The Man at the Corner Table

Rosie Shepperd’s debut poetry collection, The Man at the Corner Table (Seren), crackles with the unexpected. The voice is one of urban sophistication; a merciless charm that teases and tempts us with sensual evocations of food and place. The reader is surprised with tastes, scents, colours and textures. There is a winning insistence on detail offered with an irony that blends into satire. The poems adopt a deadly seriousness to the business of comedy. Like a secret recipe, the author’s technique is invisible, leaving us with poems whose flavors linger and become something that surprises and changes us.

Rosie Shepperd trained as an economist and worked in financial journalism and then banking in London and New York until 2004. Her poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines in the US, the UK, Ireland and continental Europe. She was a finalist in the inaugural Manchester Poetry Prize, she won the 2009 Liverpool Poetry Prize and was a winner in the 2012 Poetry Business Competition. She won second prize in the 2013 Cardiff International Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. The Man at the Corner Table is her debut collection.