NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

THINNING GRAPES is the reprint of a collection first published in 1992, and, as far as I know, the poems have not been revised or selected. Perhaps Mary Sheepshanks has moved on in the last ten years; she's a talented poet so the chances are, she has. Her work in this collection is always tuneful, imaginative and accessible:

	White horses terrorize the trees
	stampede through grass with gold names flowing
	while wakes of seagulls keen their grief
	to witness Autumn's violent going.

	Don't listen to the crying in the darkness
	Don't let anybody know that you can hear.
	Close your heart to loneliness and fear.

	An afternoon
	of raucous sun, unruly clouds:
	I watch my children
	playing tig with shadows
	steering bright boats of laughter
	to race their stretched black sails
	across cut grass;
	they chase and try to hold
	a fleeting message down
	with plimsolled feet.

An established novelist, Mary Sheepshanks is also well on her way to becoming recognized as a poet. DANCING BLUES TO SKYLARKS — nicely produced, flat-spined and with a glossy, illustrated cover — is her fourth poetry collection.

While I'm reading it, I get the impression that I have encountered a real and thoroughly nice person. Perhaps it's especially her love of nature that appeals to me, her delight in animals, trees and flowers. The list of birds that Sheepshanks describes or addresses or at least mentions is rather long, for such a slender volume as this, and includes wild geese, goldcrests, a merlin, swallows, skylarks, kingfishers and red kites. The lovely, happy Huldine, prematurely dead, is clearly another bird, but we're not told what species she belonged to. Gandalf the Grey, on the other paw, is obviously a cat whose story has a happy end. Sheepshanks lives in the Yorkshire Dales, a place which provides inspiration for much of her lyrical work.

Apart from these "Yorkshire pieces", Sheepshanks writes with great feeling about human individuals, as well as classical music. She also reveals a knack of writing skilful humorous verse, for example the delightfully gruesome THE SNAILEPHANT, a Heffalump-like creature that thinks

	little girls make quite a tasty lunch.

		mini miners' lamps
	strapped on to tiny heads

	splashed exclamation marks

		label me with your address
	that in the end I may return to you.