Jean Sprackland
Hard Water
“This second collection establishes Jean Sprackland as a definite new talent. The poems in Hard Water have the exhilarating quality of freshness and truth: poems of memory and place, religion and childhood, captured with relish in a textured and physical language. Added to this are a gift for the colloquial and a subtle, sexy humour. This is a hugely enjoyable collection by a poet writing with clear gusto and authority. Buy it – and then buy it for a friend.”
Carol Ann Duffy
“Jean Sprackland’s poems reinvent the world with a wicked, mischievous magic. Delighting in unsettling narratives and transformations, she turns the familiar landscape of everyday life into something instantly more compelling and mysterious – often anxious and troubling, but always thrilling. There is undeniable beauty at the dark heart of these poems.”
Neil Rollinson
Losing the Dark
November, when day should close early
like a dull book. But that afternoon
a small cloud in the shape of a question-mark
passed over the sun and dissolved.
Six o’clock; eight; ten. Daylight
still flooded the startled street.
Such a gift. Like one of those summer evenings
when you sit out, glass in hand,
under the darting flightpaths of swifts.
It opened faces, shops, back doors.
Sleep and secrets were like dusty fetishes;
we took midnight walks, made love in sunlit rooms.
Even on the seventh night, dreamless
and nervy, we couldn’t foresee it:
this shoving and kicking for basements
and underground stations, away from the glare
that opens you like a knife. How all the birds
might sing themselves to death.
from Hard Water (Cape, 2003)
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