Output details

Dammtor

Dammtor is a collection of poems which builds on Sheard’s earlier work in exploring the primarily urban loci of European radicalism and the sense of dispersal and defeat in a post-political world. The work interweaves political-historical themes with the idea of the individual as a personal-political failure, drawing in such themes as post-feminism, masculinity, and the failures of post-modernism. ‘Dammtor’ specifically filters these ideas through a series of ‘masculine’ voices, allowing the poems to stand as brief narratives of anger, loss, violence and compromised love – and in doing so, seek to discover unusual and uncomfortable ways of reworking the traditional modes of English poetry (lyric, elegy, argument etc.). The musical and rhythmical qualities of the poems suggest residues of formalism, in which poems hint at broken variants of sonnets, ballads and various forms of patterned or refrained poems.