‘A cul-de-sac, a dead-end track,
A sandbanked strand to sink a fleet,
A bay, a bar, a strip, a trap,
A wrecking ground, that’s Shingle Street.’

Blake Morrison’s first two collections, Dark Glasses (1984) and The Ballad of a Yorkshire Ripper (1987) established him as one of our most inventive and accomplished contemporary poets.

In his first full-length collection for nearly thirty years, Shingle Street 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.

Ardent and elegiac, and encompassing an impressive range of mood and method, this is a timely offering from a poet of distinct talents.

Shingle Street is a bravura performance that’s also solid and heartfelt -- Carol Rumens * Observer *
A good, fresh performance to make a comeback with -- Derwent May * Standpoint *
Blake Morrison’s poetry glints like a river seen through the mud -- Michael Conaghan * Belfast Telegraph Morning *
These are humane poems, skillful, conversational, delicate and more complex than they at first appear -- Rory Waterman * The Times Literary Supplement *
These are humane poems, skillful, conversational, delicate and more complex than they at first appear -- Rory Waterman * The Times Literary Supplement *
Good poetry is rare, and Blake Morrison’s…Shingle Street is the real thing. I keep going back to these poems, and enjoy them more each time -- Claire Tomalin * Week *

Born in Yorkshire, Blake Morrison is a poet, novelist, critic, journalist and librettist. He is the author of two bestselling memoirs, And When Did You Last See Your Father? (winner of the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography and the Esquire Award for Non-Fiction) and Things My Mother Never Told Me, the novels The Justification of Johann Gutenberg, South of the River and The Last Weekend, and a study of the Bulger Case, As If. His first collection, Dark Glasses, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and won the Somerset Maugham Award. He lives in South London, and is Professor of Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College.