Winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award 2010

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 of Of Mutability celebrate each waking moment as though it might be the last, and in doing so restore wonder to the smallest of encounters.