First of the Last Chances

Sophie Hannah author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd

Published:28th Mar '03

Should be back in stock very soon

First of the Last Chances cover

A new collection of warm and witty poems about pregnancy and contemporary life
Best-selling poet Sophie Hannah returns with a wonderful collection of poems that exploreand celebrate strong feelings: love, hate, anger, hope - and which strip away the veils of hypocrisy and pretence from all aspects of everyday life. From relationships to the world of work, motherhood and marriage, Sophie Hannah tells it how it is in her own inimitable style. Funny and moving, these poems combine traditional form and rhyme with a contemporary take on modern life that simultaneously raises a smile and provides thoughts to linger over. This collection also include A Woman's Life and Loves, eight poems set to music by the composer Gabriel Jackson that form a song cycle originally concieved as a contemporary and feminist response to the Schumann song cycle.
Sophie Hannah's first book was greeted with amazement. The Poetry Review declared, 'Shall I put it in capitals? SOPHIE HANNAH IS A GENIUS.' Each subsequent collection has been formally more inventive, thematically more complex, yet each has met with a similar welcome, and she has become that rare thing, a popular and best-selling poet.

No small contractions
Sophie Hannah takes light verse to new and powerful heights in First of the Last Chances, says Jeremy Noel Tod
Jeremy Noel Tod
Saturday May 3, 2003
The Guardian

The best "light verse" shines its light equally on all aspects of human behaviour. Although WH Auden's lyric "O tell me the truth about love" mentions nose-picking, it is finally a moving, as well as amusing, poem. Sophie Hannah is already among the best at comprehending in rhyming verse the indignity of having a body and the nobility of having a heart.
These lines from an early poem, for example, modulate from jokiness into a simile that pins down the mysteriousness of unrequited love as piercingly as Shelley's "The desire of the moth for the star": "I know you're real, which means you must pay taxes, / catch colds and snore. I know you know what sex is. / Still there is something in you that never mixes,

ISBN: 9781857546262

Dimensions: 215mm x 134mm x 6mm

Weight: 104g

64 pages