The virtuosity and high spirits of Sophie Hannah's poems are unusual at any time of day. She handles rhymed metrical forms with wily insouciance and passes the 'memorability test' with flying colours. A surrealising impulse unsettles even the most tidy of her stanzas with a shrewd imaginative wantonness. Her experiments with subject-matter produce something more satisfying than 'social verse'. An urban person who prefers shopping, eating and romance to hopping over cowpats on a country walk, she writes with generous rather than reductive wit.
***
[He sat in the under-heated flat, alone / Usefully passing time (he thought by choice) / Not missing anything / until the phone / Brought him the soft companion of your voice - SOFT COMPANION] ***(Carcanet Press, 14 May 2014, first published 1 August 1995, ebook, 97 pages, borrowed from the National Poetry Library)
***
***
I'm a big fan of Hannah's books and have enjoyed her poetry in the past but I just struggled to get into this collection. Apparently this is her first poetry collection so her work does get better with time. Some the poems such as Soft Companion, The Affair, Mad Queen Hospital for Electrifying the Heart and Second Helping of your Heart. The others were unremarkable and sort of blended together after a fashion.
