Book description
Dammtor is the old city gate and now the centre of ground transport
for the great port of Hamburg. In James Sheard's second collection it
is a 'station for midnights, hitched up on stone legs, hollow with
sunken light' - a hub for the damaged and deracinated. These precise,
wounded poems draw the reader through this desolate landscape -
through sexual longing, sexual violence, bereavement and the beginning
of hope through the birth of a son.
Dammtor restlessly narrates the condition of maleness,
looking for truth and music in a voice which is both urgent and
unadorned. The poems are spoken in solitary places - late-night
stations, hotel lobbies, car rides and empty woodland - but they are
addressed to the living, the missing, the dead and the just-born.
Personal and political narratives leak into the spaces of the poems to
form a strange light which has something of the hallucinatory clarity
of translations.
The voice might be by turn elegaic, vicious, obsessive or bewildered
as it explores its topic, but it is accompanied by an eye which will
not - or, perhaps, cannot - blink. Finding tenderness amid brutality,
Dammtor is a highly accomplished and remarkable collection.
James Sheard
was born in Cyprus in 1962, and spent his childhood abroad, mainly in
Singapore and Germany. As an adult, he spent periods living in Hamburg
and Helsinki. His debut collection,
Scattering Eva
, was shortlisted for the 2005 Forward Prize for Best First Collection
and the Glen Dimplex Award for Poetry. He lives in Staffordshire and
lectures at Keele University.
