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 natter jack 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.
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A finger of sunlight points the way over the floor of dead leaves. THE FENCED WOOD
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(@JonathanCape, 4 October 2007, 64 pages, borrowed from @natpoetrylib via @OverDriveInc)
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This is a new poet for me. I was drawn to this book because I liked the cover. I've also read other titles from the publisher. I really enjoyed Tilt. I plan to read other collections by the poet. I loved the references to the fierceness and power of the natural world. The imagery in the poems is breath-taking at times. I particularly enjoyed The Fenced Wood, Ice On The Beach and Birthday Poem. I'd recommend this collection.