| Jo Shapcott (b.1953) is from London but traces her family roots to the former mining communities of the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. She studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and currently teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway.
The sure-footed surrealism of her first collection, Electroplating the Baby, won immediate acclaim and was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. Shapcott had already announced her arrival on the poetry scene three years earlier when she won the National Poetry Competition, a feat which she repeated in 1991 with the title poem from her second collection, Phrase Book. This introduced Shapcott's celebrated 'Mad Cow' persona to the world and also delighted in the poetic potential of quantum physics, whilst her third collection, My Life Asleep, won the Forward Prize for best collection. A selected poems, Her Book, appeared from Faber in 2000 and they also published Tender Taxes, the fruit of Shapcott's ten-year engagement with the French poems of Rainer Maria Rilke.
Shapcott's voice relishes the sensuality of her work, exploring it with the "rangy, long-legged" brio which one critic described as her characteristic tone.
1 Introduction 0.46
2 Quark 0.40
3 Pavlova's Physics 2.01
4 Muse 1.09
5 Introduction 0.22
6 Hairless 1.07
7 Procedure 1.02
8 Of Mutability 0.52
9 Iris 1.09
10 Deft 1.33
11 Era 1.07
12 La Serenissima 1.08
13 Piss Flower 1.04
14 Introduction 0.27
15 Gherkin Music 0.35
16 Sinfonietta for London 1.04
17 Introduction 0.21
18 Shapcott's Variation on Schoenberg's orchestration of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in E flat major, 'St Anne' 0.51
19 Concerto 0.50
20 Colatura 1.21
21 Night Flight from Muncaster 2.15
22 Riddle 0.42
23 The Gods Under the Floor 1.59
24 Religion for Boys 1.52
25 Introduction 1.10
26 The Second Lie 0.34
The Gladestry Quatrains:
27 Gwaithla Brook 0.30
28 Radnorshire 0.26
29 Hanter Hill 0.26
30 Huntington Castle 0.29
31 Gwaithla Road 0.27
32 Cefn Hir 0.32
33 Dolyhir 0.28
34 Glascwm 0.30
35 To Muzot from Gladestry 0.44
36 Song in the Shed 0.39
37 Newchurch 0.24
38 Old Radnor 0.28
39 Colva 0.32
40 Caety Traylow 0.38
41 Burl Hill 0.29
42 Rilke Spotted above Gilwern 0.37
43 Hergest 0.22
44 Road Not Available 0.37
45 Born Off 0.26
46 Gilwern Lane 0.29
47 Over the Col 0.31
48 Wye Marches 0.45
49 Gilwern Dingle 0.24
50 Llan 0.34
51 Gwaithla Garden 0.54
52 Mountain Ash 0.43
53 The Third Lie 0.28
The Roses:
54 Rosa gallica 1.15
55 Rosa hemisphaerica 0.26
56 Rosa foetida 0.25
57 Rosa centifolia 0.23
58 Rosa nitida 0.24
59 Rosa arvenis 0.29
60 Rosa pimpinellifolia 0.21
61 Rosa glauca 0.23
62 Rosa sancta 0.26
63 Rosa sempervirens 0.26
64 Rosa damascena 0.21
65 Rosa canina 0.24
66 Rosa elegantula 0.28
67 Rosa multiflora 0.21
68 Rosa mutabilis 0.24
69 Rosa moschata 0.25
70 Rosa foliolosa 0.26
71 Rosa stellata 0.23
72 Rosa odorata 0.33
73 Rosa pteracantha 0.25
74 Rosa Mundi 0.25
75 The Fifth Lie 0.50
Total length of the recording 54.00
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