Robert Sheppard: Berlin Bursts
Published 15 February 2011
Paperback, 96pp, 8.5x5.5ins, £8.95 / $15
ISBN 9781848611351
These new poems use tense couplets and other "centrifugal" forms to centre their energies in nodes of impacted attention. They feature territories as dispersed as Sheppard’s local City of Culture and the global city of division and political murder of the title poem. The scar of history is drawn across the face of time, as in tragic Riga where we find reflections on artefacts of survival. Yet a series of metapoems brings agency and wonder to the idea of the poem, always seeing the world as well as itself, in perceptual double-takes that tease away at the meaning of the poetic act: "You’ll never finish reading/ the poem in the book with reality pulling itself/ inside out before your eyes". Poetics weaves its conjectures amid these voices. At the centre of the collection is 'Six Poems Against Death' whose lyric imperative hovers before the portals of the unknown to embrace human unfinish as the condition of our survival.
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Ian Davidson in Poetry Wales called Sheppard's Complete Twentieth Century Blues 'a major poem of serious intent'; Alan Baker in Litter called Warrant Error 'political poetry of the first order'.
"His approach to the sonnet is fresh and challenging, yet it's the sheer impacted condensary of his execution, its worked torsions, devilishly sour humour and relentless verbal ingenuity which drag you, nodding and shaking your head in unequal measure, through this brilliant, disquieting book." —John Muckle reviewing Warrant Error
"Robert Sheppard . . . composed a few words around Liverpool's status as City of Culture. 'Their shit's verdure but that's OK/ This isn't a nature poem.' Sheppard's near twenty-year epic, Complete Twentieth Century Blues, outweighed the Ringo returns, the showbiz art: he cooked slow and long, with tangy sauces and bits that break the teeth. The city averted its eyes . . . As if it were the poet's fault that we want our meat pre-chewed." —Iain Sinclair in Corridor8.
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