Description
Book SynopsisWinner Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry
Shortlisted for The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection Forward Poetry Prizes 2009
Poetry Bank Choice and Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In 2006 ‘The Send-Off’, an elegy for a lost child, was broadcast on Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 and the issues it raised – ante-natal testing, grief, guilt, the family, women’s lives – raged on for weeks in blogs and notice boards. But no one wondered what the poem was about. It was crystal clear. The poems in Sian Hughes debut collection, The Missing are direct and emotional. They do not hide behind imagery. They deal head on with the heart of shame, with parenting, illness, loss, regret and falling in love with the wrong people.
Table of Contents
- The Double at Highbury
- Catalogue
- Secret Lives
- The Girl Upstairs
- Taxi
- The Greedy Man
- Easy
- Noises Off
- The Sacking Offence
- Sleepwalker
- Saltpetre
- Fidelity
- The Stairs
- Shikseh
- Propaganda
- Results
- You’re
- The Night Bus
- Everybody Knows
- Cursing the Holy Ghost
- Country Compilation
- Cartoon
- Delivery
- Flood
- Electricity
- Aitken Drum
- Mengy Babies
- Fireworks on Ward 4C
- Dyslexic
- My Children
- Bear-Awareness and Self-Defence Classes
- The Fight
- Superking 6 x 6
- Xperiment!
- Sleep Training
- The Send-Off
- Sweet Ghost
- Storm Clouds
- Humpty Dumpty (Egg, or Gun)
- The Missing
- Nativity
- The Return
- Magnetic Fish
- I Turn Forty
- What If
- Your Advice
- Delete
- The Places for Crying
- Broken Sonnet
- The Theories
- Falling for Elvis
