First of the Last Chances

by Sophie Hannah

In this collection of poetry, Sophie Hannah explores and celebrates the complex interactions and strong feelings involved in everyday experience, in poems that are memorable, witty and moving.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published March 28, 2003

About the author

Sophie Hannah is an internationally bestselling writer of psychological crime fiction, published in 27 countries. In 2013, her latest novel, The Carrier, won the Crime Thriller of the Year Award at the Specsavers National Book Awards. Two of Sophie’s crime novels, The Point of Rescue and The Other Half Lives, have been adapted for television and appeared on ITV1 under the series title Case Sensitive in 2011 and 2012. In 2004, Sophie won first prize in the Daphne Du Maurier Festival Short Story Competition for her suspense story The Octopus Nest, which is now published in her first collection of short stories, The Fantastic Book of Everybody’s Secrets.

Sophie has also published five collections of poetry. Her fifth, Pessimism for Beginners, was shortlisted for the 2007 T S Eliot Award. Her poetry is studied at GCSE, A-level and degree level across the UK. From 1997 to 1999 she was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and between 1999 and 2001 she was a fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. She is forty-one and lives with her husband and children in Cambridge, where she is a Fellow Commoner at Lucy Cavendish College. She is currently working on a new challenge for the little grey cells of Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s famous detective.

Reviews

[Tee 💘🎀📖]

I loved some of the poems, but skipped so many in the middle of this anthology that it’s worthy of a DNF. I just didn’t understand the writing style and I think for an anthology, this was poorly executed.

[erris · Rating 4 out of 5]

a good poet at times. i look forward to finding more of her work.
favourites: brief encounter, your funeral, leave, GODISNOWHERE (now read again), & before sherratt and huges became waterstones

[Kirsty · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was intrigued to see what Hannah's poetry would be like, but it wasn't really to my taste. I'm not the biggest fan of neat poems with standardised rhyming schemes and quite common themes; I prefer to be startled, something which did not occur when I was reading First of the Last Chances.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found these poems very accessible.