RESULTS

A collection of poems selected from Jo Shapcott's three award winning books: Electroplating the Baby, Phrase Book and My Life Asleep. The verse showcases her politically acute and provocative imagination.

In this innovative series of public lectures at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. Jo Shapcott's three lectures explore how writers are transformed by reading. Too little attention has been paid to our relationship with what we read. The authors who are important to us move into our houses; they come alive so that we feel close enough to engage in imaginary discussions and arguments with them. This intimacy is profound, and the range of an individual's responses to any single book is enormous: the writers we read are as close as friends, enemies, lovers - closer perhaps. Speaking English through a French Mouth: The German-language poet Rainer Maria Rilke also wrote over four hundred poems in French. This lecture shows how these worked on Shapcott's imagination first as a reader, and then as a writer, culminating in 'Tender Taxes', her versions of the French poems. The lecture is illustrated with rare engravings by Rilke's lover Balandine Klossowska which accompanied ten of his French poems in their first publication. How poets read poets: Spender wrote of Hopkins that he 'ferments in other poets'. The second lecture looks at how Hopkins has been transformed by reading in the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney and others. By examining this variety of reactions to one writer, Shapcott discovers more widely how poets read and what their reading tells us about them as writers. Where to find a poem: a rough guide for the 21st century: Has the relationship between the contemporary reader and the poem been transformed by the strange times we live in?

Julia Darling's first book, Sudden Collapses in Public Places, grew from her experiences of being treated for breast cancer; '[it] helped me to step out of the difficult present and to use my imagination to be somewhere else.' Her second collection looks at the world beyond the hospital, though still from the viewpoint of a cancer patient in the advanced stages of the illness. The themes are familiar, but here she writes with a wider perspective, a deeper understanding which reach out to the heart of the human condition and the greater mysteries of life, albeit in an understated way. This is a powerful and deeply affecting book, completely unsentimental yet charged with emotion - indeed, one of those rare books that have a profound and lasting effect.