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Shingle Street

The brilliant collection from award-winning author Blake Morrison

‘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.

Shingle Street is a bravura performance that’s also solid and heartfelt

Carol Rumens, Observer

About Blake Morrison

Born in Skipton, Yorkshire, Blake Morrison is the author of bestselling memoirs, And When Did You Last See Your Father? (winner of the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography and the Esquire Award for Non-Fiction) and Things My Mother Never Told Me. His poetry collections include Dark Glasses, which won the Dylan Thomas and Somerset Maugham prizes, Pendle Witches, which was illustrated by Paula Rego, and Shingle Street. He is also a novelist, critic, journalist and librettist. He lives in South London.
Details
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • ISBN: 9781448190980
  • Length: 80 pages
  • Price: £5.99
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