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Hard Water (Paperback)

by Jean Sprackland (Author)

5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product details

Paperback: 80 pages
Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd (14 Aug 2003)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0224069594
ISBN-13: 978-0224069595
Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.4 x 1 cm

Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 604,442 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Brilliant young woman poet joins Cape list 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.

About the Author

Jean Sprackland is Education Officer for the Poetry Society. Her book Tattoos for Mothers Day was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1999. Hard Water is her second collection.

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	55% buy Tilt (Cape Poetry) 3.5 out of 5 stars (2) �6.30
	41% buy the item featured on this page: Hard Water 5.0 out of 5 stars (2)
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Average Customer Review

5.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)

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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, 23 Jan 2004

By	talesin - See all my reviews

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,
whose touch left me fingerprinted with bruises ...”

and ends

“... I turned
and took his hands, set them free.”

Or there’s “Losing the Dark”:

“... away from the glare
that opens you like a knife. How all the birds
might sing themselves to death.”

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”).
She is funny, she is accessible, she has a sharp mind and an eye for the oddness that lurks in the most ordinary things. She makes you look at the world as though for the first time. She is a real poet.
Carol Ann Duffy summed it up: “Buy it – and then buy it for a friend.”
Neither of you will regret it.

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bishops and barbies, 3 Oct 2006

By	manc "mancunian" (UK) - See all my reviews

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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