Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)These are predominantly love poems, of one sort or another, some disappointed, some enthusiastic. The overwhelming majority are pulled off with wit and panache, some are perfect anthology pieces which should be around for a good while....The difference lies in the fact that where, for instance, Wendy Cope's humour is underlain with grief, Sophie Hannah's project reveals itself as you go further into the book to be one of all but metaphysical, ethical exploration, and her metronomic heart is that of a scientist, weighing probabilities, possibilities. This book moves from an account of how certain lovers DID behave to how they SHOULD behave, to a questioning and analysis of possibilities of emotion. In this the ruling spirit is one of wit and common sense, and beneath the homey and day-to-day properties of her stage I think she is related to those seventeenth century courtiers whose loves were always transacted in a world of costs, odds, likelihoods. ...There are occasional poems about craft, about the tunneler from prison camp who does not want to give up the tunnel merely because of liberation, and the occasional more opaque and open-ended moral piece like "The Man Who Wouldn't Share His Garden with a Wolf", and if I saw a flaw to point to it would be that Hannah's talent seems at this point to be (as Kafka noted of himself on his death-bed) "still going in two directions at once" - there are the immensely polished and ready to lap up at one reading/hearing tour de forces and then there are quieter, less certain, more exploratory and, perhaps, more thoughtful pieces - but the steady canter of the polished pieces makes one's ear less inclined to stop and re-adjust to the stranger music - it is as if John Lennon suddenly went from "She Loves You" to "Imagine" in one breath (and I don't know that Hannah is that good, I'm just drawing an analogy). I don't believe she'll have to choose between the two manners but, for me at least, the collection could have been arranged to better highlight the odder pieces, which are probably her future avenue of growth, the escape route should delivering what's expected of her become oppressive.
The other criticism is that her language, while finely hewn, is transparent - I'm not sure if I'll recall a phrase that I could use to define some of my own emotions when next I am in one of the situations she describes. (Exception: "when his back turned in the bed makes one bed feel like two" stuck in my mind.) So her metaphors are apt and incisive, her patter funny, her intelligence unceasing and her experiments thoughtful - there's no knowing where she might go from here.
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This collection provides a range of romantic ironies. Sophie Hannah's poems move beyond satire to the heart of modern matter: loves, lusts, losses, and the foibles of contemporary life.
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