Napoleon's Travelling Bookshelf

Highly Commended by The Forward Prize 2010 At once erudite, humourous and stylishly contemporary, Sarah Hesketh's debut collection invokes a world of frozen lakes, 'snow-spun streets' and people who have stayed too long. With formal control and precise, crafted language, these poems examine the 'small relics of lives': china horses in an old people's home, a caged bird, the thighbone of a Saxon saint. Drawing from myth, history and a close reading of the present, Napoleon's Travelling Bookshelf is an impressive and engaging journey into love, identity and what it is to be alone - 'lost from sight / behind the ice-mapped waves'.