Life expectancy begins to fall

Tom Sastry is political, ironic, emotional, morbid and funny in all the wrong places. He has published two previous collections (both with Nine Arches) and one pamphlet. These have been (variously) Poetry School Book of the Year, Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice, highly commended in the Forward Prize and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize.

‘In Life expectancy begins to fall, Tom Sastry turns his great gifts - wit, originality, formal innovation - to the big subjects of our time. A video of an explosion plays backwards, while the real world spirals towards destruction. A schoolboy responds to finding out about the Big Bang by developing an interest in blowing things up. A poem about the purchase of a woodland burial plot moves towards a laugh-out-loud conclusion. In their mordant humour, their sideways angle on the world and the joyous precision of their language choices, the poems recall writers like Charles Simic, though Sastry's world is all his own. While the poet announces in 'Retail Politics,' that 'We can't solve the world,' one can't help but think that, if we all lived with the tenderness and good sense of this poet, we might have a better chance. It takes a special writer to have us laughing while never taking his subjects anything but seriously, or to move so fluently between humour and beautiful moments of emotive power. This may be the most important - and certainly the most entertaining - book about subjects like the end of the world I've yet found.’