History or Sleep - Selected Poems

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Robert Sheppard’s selection draws on every book of his poetry since Returns (1985) through to Words Out of Time (2015), and is designed to sample both the recurring and developing themes of his work and their restlessly changing forms. Ian Davidson in Poetry Wales called Sheppard’s Complete Twentieth Century Blues ‘a major poem of serious intent’. Of his recent Shearsman collections, Alan Baker in Litter called Warrant Error, ‘political poetry of the first order’; Ben Hickman, in PN Review, wrote ‘Berlin Bursts perhaps makes one of the biggest claims for the inherent politics of language and art in recent British poetry.’ A Translated Man, a sequence of ‘fictional poems’, was described by Tom Jenks in Tears in the Fence, as ‘a compendious work, a vademecum for innovative writing’ and as ‘a book which, whilst in keeping stylistically and thematically with Sheppard’s other work, exhibits a degree of playfulness not always so obvious there…It is, above all, a deeply pleasurable work.’ Kelvin Corcoran wrote about Words Out of Time: ‘There you are characteristically free of flash or reserve and it increases the sum of what can be written about, I think. And it’s funny.