Electroplating the baby - Jo Shapcott

The title-poem of Jo Shapcott's astonishing first collection describes an experiment by a 19th-century French scientist who devised a way of mummifying bodies by giving them a metal coating. Not all Jo Shapcott's poems are as bizarre and gruesome as this tour-de-force, but all her tales of the unexpected are as disconcerting, and cover an enormous range of subjects and ideas. A Shapcott poem can be a dangerous place, and you may find yourself on shifting ground: you start off reading a funny, skilful poem, and then suddenly it's all been swept away to reveal some savage insight into science, sexual politics or what you thought was history.