{"product_id":"9781473524248","title":"The Abandoned Settlements","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eShortlisted for the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePBS Autumn Recommendation\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe poems in James Sheard’s remarkable third book are about love and leaving, of how the rift of departure brings on a kind of haunting – of the people involved and the places where they lived – an emotional trace of departed lives and loves. This is what these poems are: the scars of separation, the spoors of desire. Sheard writes powerfully about loss, about how the vestiges of significance, of sensual heat, are retained by structures – in ghost towns, war-zones, deserted villages or resorts – but also by the human body and memory: ‘for love exists, and then is ruined, and then persists.’\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThese are poems about permanence and fragility, of being uncertain whether the house you live in is a shell, or if you have become a shell by living there – whether emptiness means loss and abandonment or a clean start and a new beginning. But these are also poems full of the ache of desire, the tart, lingering smell of sex: poems shaped by longing.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJames Sheard is one of Britain’s most assured and precise lyric poets, and his third collection brings all his considerable strengths to poems as accurate and strange as thermal images.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Random House Adult Trade Publishing Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47144415658224,"sku":"9781473524248","price":14.09,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781473524248_p0.jpg?v=1763602087","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781473524248","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}