<i>Shingle Street </i>is a bravura performance that’s also solid and heartfelt
- Carol Rumens, Observer
A good, fresh performance to make a comeback with
- Derwent May, Standpoint
Blake Morrison’s poetry glints like a river seen through the mud
- Michael Conaghan, Belfast Telegraph Morning
These are humane poems, skillful, conversational, delicate and more complex than they at first appear
- Rory Waterman, The Times Literary Supplement
These are humane poems, skillful, conversational, delicate and more complex than they at first appear
- Rory Waterman, The Times Literary Supplement
Good poetry is rare, and Blake Morrison’s…<i>Shingle Street</i> is the real thing. I keep going back to these poems, and enjoy them more each time
- Claire Tomalin, Week
‘A cul-de-sac, a dead-end track,
A sandbanked strand to sink a fleet,
A bay, a bar, a strip, a trap,
A wrecking ground, that’s Shingle Street.’
Blake Morrison’s first two collections, Dark Glasses (1984) and The Ballad of a Yorkshire Ripper (1987) established him as one of our most inventive and accomplished contemporary poets.
In his first full-length collection for nearly thirty years, Shingle Street sees a return to the form with which he started his career. Set along the Suffolk coast, the opening poems address a receding world – an eroding landscape, ‘abashed by the ocean’s passion’. But coastal life gives way to other, more dangerous, vistas: a wave unleashes a flood-tide of terror; a sequence of topical poems lays bare pressing political issues; while elsewhere portraits of the past bring forth the dear and the departed.
Ardent and elegiac, and encompassing an impressive range of mood and method, this is a timely offering from a poet of distinct talents.