Abandoned Settlements

Shortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot PrizePBS Autumn RecommendationThe 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.