Poetry
Quicksand Beach
Kate BinghamSHORTLISTED FOR THE FORWARD PRIZE 2006
Kate Bingham’s second collection, Quicksand Beach, will please fans of her fiction and of her first book of poems, Cohabitation. She has a beautifully poised natural tone composed of intelligence and a slightly subversive sense of humour, and captures her subjects with precision and grace.These subjects
are often domestic: family, friends, childhood memories, visits, walks, meals... Childhood, both the author’s and that of her own children, features often. A schoolday ‘craze’ for fountain pens prompts an affectionate memory of a younger self, watching ‘the tip of a new pen touch its first white sheet’. Bingham’s work is both subtle and accessible, a rare commodity in a poet. She can be gentle, passionate, half-mocking and very funny.
Kate Bingham lives in London. She graduated in Modern History at Oxford and has worked as a teacher and programme researcher and at a literary agency. She is the author of two novels, Mummy’s Legs and Slipstream (Virago) and is currently working on a film project. She received an Eric Gregory award and has published widely in magazines and newspapers like The Independent, The Rialto, Oxford Poetry and Poetry Wales.
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ISBN : 1-85411-411-5 Pages :gwales.com : Quicksand Beach
amazon.co.uk : Quicksand Beach
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Reviews
"A revelation to me this year was the work of Kate Bingham, whose second collection, Quicksand Beach, shows a poet already in complete command of her voice and of her form. Spry, witty, gently cynical, her talky lyrics about love and domestic life are a pure pleasure to read; and she has a breathtakingly acute ear. I read most of a sestina without even noticing that it was a sestina. That’s craft", Sam Leith, The Telegraph 09/12/06
’There’s something profoundly English about these intelligent, technically accomplished poems: understated, almost self-deprecating, but subtly rewarding.’
Financial Times, December 2006
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