Berlin Bursts and Other Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781848611351)

These new poems use tense couplets and other "centrifugal" forms to centre their energies in nodes of impacted attention. They feature territories as dispersed as Sheppard's local City of Culture and the global city of division and political murder of the title poem. The scar of history is drawn across the face of time, as in tragic Riga where we find reflections on artefacts of survival. Yet a series of metapoems brings agency and wonder to the idea of the poem, always seeing the world as well as itself, in perceptual double-takes that tease away at the meaning of the poetic act - "You'll never finish reading/ the poem in the book with reality pulling itself/ inside out before your eyes". Poetics weaves its conjectures amid these voices. At the centre of the collection is 'Six Poems Against Death' whose lyric imperative hovers before the portals of the unknown to embrace human unfinish as the condition of our survival.