Inroads

Carolyn Jess-Cooke was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1978 and currently lives in north-east England. Her debut poetry collection Inroads (Seren, 2010) received a Northern Promise Award, an Eric Gregory Award, the Tyrone Guthrie Prize for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the New London Poetry Prize. Her debut novel The Guardian Angel’s Journal (Little, Brown/Piatkus, 2011) was published in 22 languages and her second novel, The Boy Who Could See Demons, is being made into a film. A number of her poetry commissions are featured in public art installations around England, including a poem set into a 700m ribbon of steel that runs throughout a mental health complex in Middlesbrough. She has performed her work at many festivals and venus around the world, including the Sydney Writers' Festival, the Irish Writers Centre and at the Sage Gateshead. She is mother to four children aged 1, 3, 5, and 7.

This first collection is a sparking variety-act, choreographed with a strong but daring sense of form. There are subversive triolets, an air-borne re-invention of Larkin's poem, 'The Whitsun Weddings,'and poems in experimental 'field' lay-out. Some are almost surrealistic, as memories get up and perform karaoke-songs, or a brutal beating becomes a music lesson. In others, Greek myths may be modernised and filmed, haunting landscapes captured, young motherhood described with witty realism and sensuousness. While memory at times traces darker inroads among the glittering, high-wire acts and comic cadenzas, the imaginative movement of the collection is outwards towards celebration. Jess-Cooke is a poet who revels in the magical pleasure of language, and readers will enjoy sharing it with her. -Carol Rumens There are breathtaking poems here. Whether writing about motherhood, accent, place or mischievously entwining the Classical world with YouTube and cable TV shows -and somehow still drawing pathos from it - Jess-Cooke has an unflinching honesty to match her powerful imagery. 'Bitten' makes you feel like you've been bitten, 'First Time Buyer' makes you feel like you've just got home, and 'A poem without any vegetables' makes you feel like you have children. Combine this with a sense of wide and deep reading, of reacting, of making a range of styles her own. Inroads feels refreshingly transatlantic - this is a poet unafraid of crossing boundaries, capable of being as simultaneously playful and serious as good literature always is. -Luke Kennard