Book description
Jean Sprackland's third collection describes a world in free-fall.
Chaos and calamity are at our shoulder, in the shape of fire and
flood, ice-storm and hurricane; trains stand still, zoos are
abandoned, migrating birds lose their way - all surfaces are
unreliable, all territories unmapped.
These are poems that explore the ambivalence and dark unease of
slippage and collapse, but they also carry a powerful sense of the
miraculous made manifest amongst the ordinary: the mating of
natterjack toads, ice on the beach ('dream stuff, with its own
internal acoustic') or 'the fund of life' in a used contraceptive.
Bracken may run wild across the planet 'waiting for the moment/to
pounce on the accident/of the discarded match' but there are also the
significant wonders of children and the natural beauty of the world
they've inherited. Tilt is a collection of raw, distressed and
beautiful poems, a hymn to the remarkable survival of things in the
face of threat - for every degradation an epiphany, for every drowning
a birth.
Jean Sprackland's first collection of poetry,
Tattoos for Mothers Day
was shortlisted for the Forward First Book Award in 1999. Her second
collection,
Hard Water
, was published by Cape in 2003 and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot
Award and the Whitbread Poetry Award. In 2004 Jean Sprackland was named
by the Poetry Book Society as one of the 'Next Generation' poets. She
lives in Southport.
