The Hero and the Girl Next Door

Book excerpt: The virtuosity and high spirits of Sophie Hannah's poems are unusual at any time of day. She handles rhymed metrical forms with wily insouciance and passes the 'memorability test' with flying colours. A surrealising impulse unsettles even the most tidy of her stanzas with a shrewd imaginative wantonness. Her experiments with subject-matter produce something more satisfying than 'social verse'. An urban person who prefers shopping, eating and romance to hopping over cowpats on a country walk, she writes with generous rather than reductive wit.