{"title":"James Sheard","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the poignant poetry and prose of James Sheard. Explore themes of nature, memory, and the human condition through his evocative verse. Perfect for fans of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"dammtor-book-james-sheard-9780224090735","title":"Dammtor","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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49539834511633,"sku":"GOR002234645","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53026996125969,"sku":"GOR011381463","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0224090739.jpg?v=1751101640"},{"product_id":"abandoned-settlements-book-james-sheard-9781910702475","title":"The Abandoned Settlements","description":"Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize PBS Autumn Recommendation  The poems in James Sheard’s remarkable third book are about love and leaving, of how the rift of departure brings on a kind of haunting – of the people involved and the places where they lived – an emotional trace of departed lives and loves. This is what these poems are: the scars of separation, the spoors of desire. Sheard writes powerfully about loss, about how the vestiges of significance, of sensual heat, are retained by structures – in ghost towns, war-zones, deserted villages or resorts – but also by the human body and memory: ‘for love exists, and then is ruined, and then persists.’  These are poems about permanence and fragility, of being uncertain whether the house you live in is a shell, or if you have become a shell by living there – whether emptiness means loss and abandonment or a clean start and a new beginning. But these are also poems full of the ache of desire, the tart, lingering smell of sex: poems shaped by longing.  James Sheard is one of Britain’s most assured and precise lyric poets, and his third collection brings all his considerable strengths to poems as accurate and strange as thermal images.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49549943374097,"sku":"GOR008362322","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49737335144721,"sku":"NGR9781910702475","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1910702471.jpg?v=1751281903"},{"product_id":"scattering-eva-book-james-sheard-9780224075848","title":"Scattering Eva","description":"In this remarkably assured, elegant first collection, James Sheard takes on the subject of the individual in European history, suspecting that the End of History has been announced a little early. The environment inhabited by his poetry is pervaded by ideologies and upheavals, both old and new; the speakers of his poems brag, explain, confess, resign, but are always human in their concerns. What emerges is a series of poems like skeletal mechanisms, set ticking at those moments when his characters connect, however briefly or tangentially, with the forces that surround them. Sheard aims for epic scale in small spaces. Where the shorter poems seem to touch and withdraw, the long title poem \"Scattering Eva\" sets out to explore. The story of the narrator returning the ashes of a survivor of the Hamburg firestorm raids to that city is told in a filmic and fragmentary narrative in which Sheard probes the fractures of gender, generation, nationality and complicity. Densely worked and startlingly original, the poems in \"Scattering Eva\" announce the arrival of a new poet of maturity and great power.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49611768430865,"sku":"GOR005026675","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51171906748689,"sku":"GOR001864058","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0224075845.jpg?v=1750737944"},{"product_id":"successful-manager-s-handbook-book-brian-l-davis-9780938529002","title":"Successful Manager's Handbook","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50098484674833,"sku":"CIN0938529005G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0938529005.jpg?v=1750981199"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-james-sheard.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}