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Book Description
Product Description
Though firmly rooted in the domestic, natural world, Jean Sprackland's poems are thrilling excursions into the lives that we live alongside our everyday ones: the lives we are aware of in dreams, in grief, in love. She shows us the vertigo and vulnerability of human experience with great clarity and precision, tenderness and care.
These are vivid poems full of light and weather and water - awash with water: a flooded forest, acid rain, an inland tidal wave, an ocean of broken glass; jellyfish washed up on the beach that 'lay like saints/ unharvested, luminous'. There is an arresting imagination at work here, one as relaxed and at home in an alternative world of babies in filing cabinets, light collectors or the visiting dead, as it is in the world we think we know: supermarkets, empty flats, the A580 from Liverpool to Manchester. In the title poem, Sprackland sets out her store: 'I tried the soft stuff on holiday in Wales, a mania of teadrinking and hairwashing, excitable soap which never rinsed away, but I loved coming home to this. Flat. Straight. Like the vowels, Like the straight talk: hey up me duck - the blunt taste of don't get mardy, of too bloody deep for me, fierce lovely water that marked me for life as belonging, regardless.'
Lucid, sensuous and informed by an unusually tactile curiosity, the poems in Hard Water mark the assured arrival of an important poet.
(20030303)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Believe the hype - she's the real thing,
This review is from: Hard Water (Paperback)
I was wary of this book at first – how else do you respond when the official Book Synopsis begins with the words “Brilliant young woman poet joins Cape list”? But for once, the hype is justified.I’d read her first book, “Tattoos for Mother’s Day”, so I knew she had ability. An interesting quirkiness, a hint of darkness in her poetry. It was a quietly competent first book. But so often the second book (or album, or film) is a real disappointment. But not here. This is a stunning book – her range, her technique, her deftness in expression all point to the development of a real poetic talent. “The Apprentice” opens with: “I married a big man with clumsy hands, and ends “... I turned Or there’s “Losing the Dark”: “... away from the glare Her work ranges from the macabre (“St Nicholas and the Salted Boys”) through the sexual (“Shadow Photograph”, "The Apprentice") to the political (“Soulless”). There are fables ( “Lifesaving”, “Holy”) and excursions into other characters (“A Hangman’s New Career”, “Mr Smiley”).
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bishops and barbies,
By
This review is from: Hard Water (Paperback)
She's like a Morrissey without the jangle, a spinner of shiny stuff from the grey peri-urban detritus of glum suburbs. A dead mother arrives as an unexpected guest, school girls meet up for strange sensual bonding rituals, and empty shops take on a rude and urgent poignancy. In this deeply moving collection Sprackland swoops from discarded Barbie dolls to sinister bishops and underwater communication cables, yet ends it all on yearning for innocence, spontaneity, and a curious urge towards the secretive. These startling poems have a lovely way of slapping unusual words together to make compelling noises, and in this way they zoom from micro to macro in seconds, retaining deep focus throughout. I can't wait for the next collection.
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