Winner of the Costa Book of the Year 2010 and Winner of the the Costa Poetry Award 2010.
Costa Book Awards 2010 Judges' comment: "A cutting-edge collection about surviving breast cancer but believing that hope, humanity and imagination matter even more. Playful, unflinching and utterly generous."
“We were captivated by the poetry in this special, original, compassionate, uplifting and accessible book that readers will go back to again and again.”
Jo Shapcott's award-winning first three collections, gathered in Her Book: Poems 1988-1998, revealed her to be a writer of ingenuous, politically acute and provocative poetry, and rightly earned her a reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation. In Of Mutability, Shapcott is found writing at her most memorable and bold. In a series of poems that explore the nature of change - in the body and the natural world, and in the shifting relationships between people - these poems look freshly but squarely at mortality. By turns grave and playful, arresting and witty, the poems in Of Mutability celebrate each waking moment as though it might be the last, and in so doing restore wonder to the smallest of encounters.
This beautifully designed edition forms part of a series of ten titles celebrating Faber's publishing over the decades.
Jo Shapcott was born in London. Poems from her three award-winning collections, Electroplating the Baby (1988), Phrase Book (1992) and My Life Asleep (1998) are gathered in a selected poems, Her Book (2000). She has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry Competition (twice). Tender Taxes, her versions of Rilke, was published in 2001; Of Mutability in 2010.
