My sister knows my name and nothing else.
My mother knows my shoe size.
My father knows what kind of books I read.

My friends know where I drink.
My husband knows the colour of my hair.
My children know my rules.

My dentist knows I need another filling.
My boss knows I work late.
My cat knows that I'll share a turkey sandwich.

I know what makes me laugh.
I laugh at what they don't know.
They don't know very much about my dentist.

'Another Filling'

The virtuosity and high spirits of Sophie Hannah's poems are unusual at any time of day. She handles rhymed metrical forms with wily insouciance and passes the 'memorability test' with flying colours. What seems simple or simply achieved more often than not on closer inspection yields subtleties of feeling and form. A surrealising impulse unsettles even the most tidy of her stanzas with a shrewd imaginative wantonness. Her experiments with subject-matter produce something more satisfying than 'social verse'. An urban person who prefers shopping, eating and romance to hopping over cowpats on a country walk, she writes with generous rather than reductive wit.