Description: Autobiographical poems about childhood and adolescence.
Review Quotes: "This sardonic and resourceful poet can go for miles without anything resembling an exact sensuous image, sustaining himself on irony, intelligence and a brand of lugubrious affirmation that is altogether his own. The Terrible Shears is a sequence of autobiographical poems describing childhood and adolescence in Leamington in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of the pieces are slight; the method is relaxed and anecdotal, but in eighty-four examples there is hardly a dud and the wit and fluency with which they are interconnected make this one of the most readable books of verse in years. It is also a very moving one; without sentimentality, and often by laconic understatement, Mr. Enright shows us vividly what it was like to grow up in a particular town in circumstances of poverty and an atmosphere of disease and death.... Much of the book, even in its grimmest incidents, is extremely funny and... the excitement of childhood is buoyant throughout. And there is love, confusedly extended and received; here Mr. Enright is specially good at combining the child's-eye view with adult interpretative hindsight in a way that falsifies neither account. His book is real, and a delight." -- The Times Literary Supplement