‘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, 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.
Author
Blake Morrison was educated at Nottingham University, McMaster University and University College, London. After working for the Times Literary Supplement, he went on to become literary editor of both The Observer and the Independent on Sunday before becoming a full-time writer in 1995. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and former Chair of the Poetry Book Society and Vice-Chair of PEN, Blake has written fiction, poetry, journalism, literary criticism and libretti, as well as adapting plays for the stage. His best-known works are probably his two memoirs, "And When Did You Last See Your Father?" and "Things My Mother Never Told Me." Since 2003, Blake has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. He lives in south London, with his wife and three children.
