Jean Sprackland is celebrated for her tactile, transformative poetry which makes the miraculous seem familiar and the domestic other-worldly. Her new collection is tuned to new and deeper frequencies. 'Green noise' is the mid-frequency component of white noise - what some have called the background noise of the world - and these poems listen for what is audible, and available to be known and understood, and what is not. Each poem is an attempt at location - in time, in place, in language. Some enquire into the natural world and our human place in it, by investigating hidden worlds within worlds: oak-apples, aphid-farms, firewood teeming with small life. Others go in search of fragments of a mythic and often brutal past: the lost haunts of childhood, abandoned villages, scraps of shared history which are only ever partially remembered. A physical relic or a mark on the landscape seems briefly to offer a portal, where a sounding is taken from present to past and back again.
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machine of spring with all your levers thrown to maxclouds in ripped clothes and sheep trailing afterbirthwhere last week's buds sucked blue juice from the dusknow the branch is swollen
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(@JonathanCape, 11 October 2018, e-book, 64 pages, borrowed from @natpoetrylib)
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I really enjoyed Green Noise. Some of the poems explore nature and the natural world which is something I tend to not enjoy very much. However, these poems were so striking, well-written and used impressive imagery and I couldn't help but enjoy them. The other poems explore themes and ideas than can be said to be universal but in a slightly different way, offering fresh insight into oft-used ideas. I enjoyed this collection very much.
