Jean Sprackland’s ‘Goyle, Chert, Mire’: A Linguistic Immersion

Jean Sprackland’s sixth collection, Goyle, Chert, Mire (Jonathan Cape, £13), presents a remarkable feat of poetic construction. The 45 sonnets, eschewing rhyme, weave together three interconnected sequences rooted in the Blackdown Hills, a region straddling Somerset and Devon. Sprackland doesn’t simply depict the landscape; she renders it as a dynamic linguistic event, observing how “a drop swells on the lip of a leaf and falls / like a word being said.”

A deliberate absence of the first-person perspective invites an intimate encounter with the environment. Readers experience the hills through “mossy silence,” the “rumble of the combine harvester,” and the “noise / of meltwater hurtling over stones.” This immersive quality is heightened by the subtle presence of an unnamed illness, which casts a shadow over the poems without resorting to overt displays of suffering. Instead, attention is drawn to the minute details of the natural world – “pilgrim gnats attending the water” and the mire’s gradual transformation.

Sprackland masterfully shifts between macro and micro perspectives, mirroring the way consciousness navigates different scales of existence. Unlike poetry that anthropomorphizes nature, her work acknowledges the limitations of human agency, recognizing that “language itself is prone to collapse.” However, within this potential disintegration, meaning can be found, revealing the “spiky logic” of natural processes. The steadfast sonnet form itself becomes a symbol of resilience, a disciplined response to both illness and the inherent instability of language. This is a collection that lingers, offering a profound and enduring meditation on the relationship between language, landscape, and the human experience.

Kim Moore’s ‘The House of Broken Things’: Confronting Trauma and Motherhood

Kim Moore’s The House of Broken Things (Corsair, £14.99) tackles ambitious themes of intergenerational trauma and the complexities of motherhood. Moore’s strength lies in her confessional voice, evident in poems like “The Black Notices,” which catalogs the stories of unidentified murdered women, and “Giving Birth With Anne Sexton,” a powerful dialogue between personal experience and literary inheritance.

However, the collection occasionally veers into more didactic territory. Poems such as “Damaged Cento,” outlining the “eight stages” of domestic homicide, and “The Trimesters,” documenting the physical changes of pregnancy, sometimes feel more like exercises in cataloging than fully realized poetic explorations. While the poems concerning motherhood are deeply felt, they navigate familiar ground – breastfeeding, bedtime routines, and the anxieties surrounding parental loss – and struggle to break new lyrical ground. Moore prioritizes emotional transparency and vulnerability, presenting the “I” as a shared human experience, even if it means sacrificing some degree of formal innovation.

What do you think is more important in poetry: raw emotional honesty or groundbreaking formal experimentation? And how can poets effectively address difficult subjects like trauma without falling into the trap of didacticism?

Further exploration of contemporary poetry can be found at the Poetry Foundation, a valuable resource for both established and emerging poets. The The Poetry Society also offers a wealth of information and opportunities for poetry lovers.

Frequently Asked Questions About Recent Poetry

Did You Know? The sonnet form, despite its strict structure, has been continually reinvented by poets throughout history, proving its remarkable adaptability.