Shingle Street Av Blake Morrison

<p><i>¿A cul-de-sac, a dead-end track,<br>A sandbanked strand to sink a fleet,<br>A bay, a bar, a strip, a trap, <br>A wrecking ground, that¿s Shingle Street.¿</i><br><br>Blake Morrison¿s first two collections, <i>Dark Glasses</i> (1984) and <i>The Ballad of a Yorkshire Ripper</i> (1987) established him as one of our most inventive and accomplished contemporary poets.<br><br>In his first full-length collection for nearly thirty years, <i>Shingle Street</i> sees a return to the form with which he started his career. Set along the Suffolk coast, the opening poems address a receding world ¿ an eroding landscape, ¿abashed by the ocean¿s passion¿. But coastal life gives way to other, more dangerous, vistas: a wave unleashes a flood-tide of terror; a sequence of topical poems lays bare pressing political issues; while elsewhere portraits of the past bring forth the dear and the departed. <br><br>Ardent and elegiac, and encompassing an impressive range of mood and method, this is a timely off