Quicksand Beach

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.