New Releases by Jo Shapcott

Poems 1988-1998 is a compendium from Jo Shapcott''s award-winning books Electroplating the Baby, Phrase Book and My Life Asleep. It reveals her to be a writer of ingenious, politically acute and provocative imagination and justifies her reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation.

Towards the end of his life the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) wrote nearly four hundred poems in French - notably the two collections published as Les Fenêtres (The Windows) and Les Roses. The emergence of a French Rilke provides the starting point rather than the terminus for Jo Shapcott''s new collection, Tender Taxes, which re-imagines Rilke''s brief and fugitive lyrics as English poems. The occasion is Rilke, but these are more than versions: Shapcott''s poems address this, arguing with the originals, crossing and re-crossing the frontier between translation and origination. Rilke and Shapcott are brought together in the shared incognito of a foreign language, ''speaking English through a French mouth''.

Jo Shapcott''s award-winning first three collections, gathered in Her Book: Poems 1988-1998, revealed her to be a writer of ingenuous, politically acute and provocative poetry, and rightly earned her a reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation. In Of Mutability, Shapcott is found writing at her most memorable and bold. In a series of poems that explore the nature of change - in the body and the natural world, and in the shifting relationships between people - these poems look freshly but squarely at mortality. By turns grave and playful, arresting and witty, the poems in Of Mutability celebrate each waking moment as though it might be the last, and in so doing restore wonder to the to the smallest of encounters.

Based upon a collection of public lectures delivered by Jo Shapcott as part of her professorship at the University of Newcastle, this volume addresses the history and criticism of literature.

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature. George Herbert (1593-1633) was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was appointed Reader in Rhetoric in 1618 and Public Orator in 1620. He was a Greek and Latin scholar, was fluent in modern languages and an accomplished musician. In 1626 he resigned his seat in parliament and took holy orders, becoming Rector of Bemerton, a tiny rural parish on Salisbury Plain, in 1630. The Temple, Herbert''s great structure of poems from which the present selection is drawn, first appeared in 1633, the year of his death.

My Life Asleep is a vigorous collection of poems, lively and never succumbing to gloom, despite their black humour and sometimes macabre tone. This is Jo Shapcott''s third collection. She is the joint anthologist with Matthew Sweeney of Emergency Kit for Faber, and her work is appearing in a volume of Penguin Modern Poets. She lives in London, and is kept busy on the reading circuit.

Another volume in a series highlighting contemporary British poetry. It features the work of three poets and they themselves have made the selections.

Jo Shapcott''s award-winning first book, Electroplating the Baby, established her as an important member of the younger generation of poets. In this new book, she calls on a host of different voices to offer their witty and sharply ironic views on the modern world.

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.