Partial Shade: Poems New and Selected by John Birtwhistle Penny Boxall searing poems that break your

searing poems that break your heart so fast you hardly notice you’re standing knee deep in a pool of implications

With language as its theme

and likewise just after the publication of the seminal text

Bantam brings three generations into sharp focus – Kay’s own

Partial Shade: Poems New and Selected by John Birtwhistle Penny Boxall searing poems that break your'Partial Shade' is the common gardening term for plants that in fact need a measure of sunshine. In John Birtwhistle's poems, there is a continual play of light and shadow and even glimpses of 'full sun'. This selection from his own work does not follow chronology. It is an entirely fresh ordering, in which poems converse and argue with each other across the years. Lines about politics, parenting, mortality, art (and love, 'that bookish theme') are