History or Sleep - Selected Poems

<p>Robert Sheppard's selection draws on every book of his poetry since <em>Returns</em> of 1985 through to <em>Words Out of Time</em> of 2015 and is designed to sample both the recurring and developing themes of his work and their restlessly changing forms. Ian Davidson in <em>Poetry Wales</em> called Sheppard's <em>Complete Twentieth Century Blues</em> 'a major poem of serious intent'. Of his recent Shearsman collections Alan Baker in Litter called <em>Warrant Error</em> 'political poetry of the first order'; Ben Hickman in PN Review wrote 'Berlin Bursts perhaps makes one of the biggest claims for the inherent politics of language and art in recent British poetry.' <em>A Translated Man</em> a sequence of 'fictional poems' was described by Tom Jenks in <em>Tears in the Fence</em> as 'a compendious work a vademecum for innovative writing' and as 'a book which whilst in keeping stylistically and thematically with Sheppard's other work exhibits a degree of playfulness not always so obvious there... It is above all a deeply pleasurable work.' Kelvin Corcoran wrote about <em>Words Out of Time</em>: 'There you are characteristically free of flash or reserve and it increases the sum of what can be written about I think. And it's funny.'</p>