Summer Reads 2012: Of Mutability- Jo Shapcott

Synopsis

Jo Shapcott was born in London. Poems from her three award-winning collections, Electroplating the Baby (1988), Phrase Book (1992) and My Life Asleep (1998) are gathered in a selected poems, Her Book (2000). She has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry Competition (twice). Tender Taxes, her versions of Rilke, was published in 2001. Her most recent collection, Of Mutability, was published in 2010 and won the Costa Book Award. In 2011 Jo Shapcott was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Selected Quotes

“Full of wisdom and joy, a book for a lifetime.” Carol Ann Duffy

"Wise, mind-opening collection ... [it] deserves to be as widely read as any bestselling self-help book." Sunday Telegraph

"Shapcott's is a voice that reaches out and grabs. In all her work, she transforms the extraordinary into the immediately plausible ... Whatever her province, her concern remains for the chaotically unaccountable in humanity." --Mark Wormald, Times Literary Supplement

"[Shapcott] displays a talent both intimate and joyful, humorous and tender ... what comes through most powerfully, though, is her warmth and humanity." Daily Telegraph, Editor's Choice

Author Biography

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.