Sheila Whitehouse

Flint and Needle Sheila Whitehouse

. . . quiet, colloquial, often witty without sacrificing depth and breadth of emotion-and they range from the elegiac to the surreal, the narrative to the lyrical. She is, in other words, a poet of enormous talent in the mode of William Meredith and Michael Collier. Rick Jackson Her strengths are a thoroughness and appropriateness of her images and the fullness and texturing of her sentences . . . an effective exploration of how image can build a bridge between the personal and the universal. Leslie Ullman . . . has a gift for juxtaposing images of quotidian routine and fantastic menace in scenes which evoke strange psychological states. Other poems offer compassionate portraits of women in conflict. She also has a keen sense of the unexpected detail, quirky diction, the striking power of images and how statements can be applied within them. Belle Waring