Dammtor by James Sheard

This is the second collection by co-founder of the Poetry Pharmacy, James Sheard and is a signed copy. 

Dammtor is the old city gate and now the centre of ground transport for the great port of Hamburg. In James Sheard's second collection it is a 'station for midnights, hitched up on stone legs, hollow with sunken light' - a hub for the damaged and deracinated. These precise, wounded poems draw the reader through this desolate landscape - through sexual longing, sexual violence, bereavement and the beginning of hope through the birth of a son.

Dammtor restlessly narrates the condition of maleness, looking for truth and music in a voice which is both urgent and unadorned. The poems are spoken in solitary places - late-night stations, hotel lobbies, car rides and empty woodland - but they are addressed to the living, the missing, the dead and the just-born. Personal and political narratives leak into the spaces of the poems to form a strange light which has something of the hallucinatory clarity of translations.

James Sheard’s Dammtor is a wounding, darkly stirring collection of narratives describing a world of loss, lust and hope reborn. This snapshot of a bleak society centres around the old city gate of Hamburg, the eponymous Dammtor. Sheard’s first collection, Scattering Eva, was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize. Now Dammtor – the Poetry Book Society Choice – further showcases Sheard’s remarkable and lyrical voice.

The voice might be by turn elegiac, vicious, obsessive or bewildered as it explores its topic, but it is accompanied by an eye which will not - or, perhaps, cannot - blink. Finding tenderness amid brutality, Dammtor is a highly accomplished and remarkable collection.