From PBS Selectors’ Review of Dammtor
"...a voice that isn't under any illusions, spare and precise, and able repeatedly to exercise great vigour in idea and language..."
"Precision here works in the service of elegy or obsession; the speaker in these poems manages to admit ugliness and violence but...also tunes into sadness and deflected sweetness [and] a sense of quest and homelessness..."
From Tower Poetry’s Review of Scattering Eva
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
Scattering Eva Endorsements
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
From PBS Selectors’ Review of Hotel Mastbosch
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'. - Mario Petrucci