The Shape of the Dance: Essays, Interviews and Digressions - Tapa dura

When Michael Donaghy died in 2004 at the age of fifty, he was one of the UK's best-known and best-loved poets; he was also a literary critic of the first rank. Donaghy's prose is notable for the same delightfully lucid style and lightly worn erudition so admired in his verse. His was also the most intellectually promiscuous of minds, and he was happy to allude to Irish music, neuroscience and Renaissance art in the same breath - and rarely resisted a good joke, if it served his argumentative purpose. This companion volume to the Collected Poems gathers together the best of his writing on poetry and the arts, as well as a number of fascinating and revealing interviews. It also reprints his classic primer in ars poetica, `Wallflowers'.

Michael Donaghy was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1954. In 1985 he moved to London, where he worked as a teacher and traditional Irish musician. His previous collections are Shibboleth, Errata (published in one volume, entitled Dances Learned Last Night), Conjure, and Safest. His Collected Poems are also published by Picador.