Electroplating the Baby by Jo Shapcott

Electroplating the Baby by Jo Shapcott

The title-poem of Jo Shapcott's astonishing first collection describes an experiment by a 19th-century French scientist who devised a way of mummifying bodies by giving them a metal coating. Not all Jo Shapcott's poems are as bizarre and gruesome as this tour-de-force, but all her tales of the unexpected are as disconcerting, and cover an enormous range of subjects and ideas. A Shapcott poem can be a dangerous place, and you may find yourself on shifting ground: you start off reading a funny, skilful poem, and then suddenly it's all been swept away to reveal some savage insight into science, sexual politics or what you thought was history.

She turns the notion of privatisation and the private life inside out and plays all sorts of tricks with social consciousness, with politics, with history, with the imagination-- Tom Paulin

Jo Shapcott is one of Britain's leading poets. She has twice won the National Poetry Competition, and won the Forward Prize in 1999. She was Northern Arts Literary Fellow at the universities of Newcastle and Durham in 1998-2000, and is Visiting Professor of Poetry at Newcastle University and at the University of the Arts, London; she also teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College. Her poetry books include Electroplating the Baby (Bloodaxe Books, 1988), Phrase Book (OUP, 1992), My Life Asleep (OUP, 1998), Her Book (Faber, 1999), Tender Taxes, including her versions from Rilke's French poems (Faber, 2001), and Of Mutability (2010), winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award. She co-edited the anthology Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times (Faber, 1996) with Matthew Sweeney, and Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery (Bloodaxe / Newcastle University, 2002) with Linda Anderson. She gave the first of the Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, The Transformers, in 2001, the book of which may one day be published by Bloodaxe. She received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2011.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781852240684
ISBN 10	1852240687
Title	Electroplating the Baby
Author	Jo Shapcott
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Year published	1988-11-17
Number of pages	64
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable