Shortlisted for the Forward Prize 2006

Kate Bingham’s second collection, Quicksand Beach, will please fans of her fiction and of her first book of poems, Cohabitation. She has a beautifully poised natural tone composed of  intelligence and a slightly subversive sense of humour, and captures her subjects with precision and grace.

These subjects are often domestic: family, friends, childhood memories, visits, walks, meals... Childhood, both the author’s and that of her own children, features often. A schoolday ‘craze’ for fountain pens prompts an affectionate memory of a younger self, watching ‘the tip of a new pen touch its first white sheet’. Bingham’s work is both subtle and accessible, a rare commodity in a poet. She can be gentle, passionate, half-mocking and very funny.