Tender
Calls to Prayer
J V Prospero
Some comments:
Sheard's gritty lyricism is 'heavy with oils', laden with unsettling aromatics; yet it always floats easily on the ear. From the pungent opening ('Old money smells of civet') to palled close these poems are quietly superheated, forever on the point of ignition. Although far from transparent, his black gold often oozes surprisingly close to the surface, lubricating some hard secret further down. Stay with him, 'digging / knuckle-deep in my roots / and finding stone'. - PBS Review
Scattering Eva is an ambitious and exhilarating collection. James Sheard can manage both scale and intimacy, governed by a fine ear, in language both rich and chaste. Combining love, politics, history and belief, Scattering Eva quickly takes up residence in the reader’s imagination. Sheard is also something of a rarity – a manifestly European poet working in English. Not to be missed. — Sean O’Brien
These poems burn with life and feeling. James Sheard is an eloquent writer whose linguistic verve is offset by short, spare lines and a sombre musicality. — Helen Dunmore
This is a remarkable first collection by a poet for whom human experience is the ‘kindling to history’: his language has the acid precision of a drypoint, perfectly servicing the difficult ambition of its subject-matter with images that made me catch my breath. — Adam Thorpe
The violence of the past wakes his poetry to echoes, in Studying Santiago: ‘you give me his names:/ Pilgrim. Slayer.’ He has a powerful, almost mythic sense of political struggle, which opens his lines to other voices, like the outcast living off the land in J. V. Prospero: ‘Send news. Send books. I’ll not burn ‘em’. His favourite travelling companion is not love. It is death who leaves the sounds of Sheard’s lines richer, its rhythms more subtle. — Alison Brackenbury in a review at Tower Poetry.