Dammtor

Dammtor is the old city gate and now the centre of ground transport for the great port of Hamburg. In James Sheard's second collection it is a 'station for midnights, hitched up on stone legs, hollow with sunken light' - a hub for the damaged and deracinated. These precise, wounded poems draw the reader through this desolate landscape - through sexual longing, sexual violence, bereavement and the beginning of hope through the birth of a son. Dammtor restlessly narrates the condition of maleness,