Book description
Jo Shapcott's award-winning first three collections, gathered in
Her Book: Poems 1988-1998, revealed her to be a writer of
ingenuous, politically acute and provocative poetry, and rightly
earned her a reputation as one of the most original and daring voices
of her generation. In Of Mutability, Shapcott is found writing
at her most memorable and bold. In a series of poems that explore the
nature of change - in the body and the natural world, and in the
shifting relationships between people - these poems look freshly but
squarely at mortality. By turns grave and playful, arresting and
witty, the poems in Of Mutability celebrate each waking moment
as though it might be the last, and in so doing restore wonder to the
to the smallest of encounters.
Jo Shapcott was born in London. Poems from her three
award-winning collections, Electroplating the Baby (1988),
Phrase Book (1992) and My Life Asleep (1998) are
gathered in a selected poems, Her Book (2000). She has won a
number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers Prize for
Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the
National Poetry Competition (twice). Tender Taxes, her versions
of Rilke, was published in 2001.
