Jackie Wills – författare

Wills gives readers the exceptional at the heart of daily life, invites us to suspend disbelief, enable the surreal.She begins Making the Wedding Dress with a quote from a handbook on sewing and asks what can be fixed, what does it mean to make a daughter’s wedding dress. The collection fans out to explore bullying, money, trade, rats and sinkholes. A third section questions how humans relate to other species, speculates on a worm's opinion of people, the communal life of starlings. The book ends on ideas of exits and entrances, home, absences within a family and the fragility of care.Making the Wedding Dress makes many unexpected connections, moving from sauna to plum tree, to a luxury yacht cruising off Brighton beach. It asks what crows think of humans, it urges its readers to question what is normal.Jackie Wills’ six previous collections have taken on big issues but her poems are always grounded. Her poems have been described as warm and witty, satirical, feminist and unputdownable. She starts with the mundane, then exaggerates – a list of the many words used to describe a woman, a sequence of short, impressionist poems on the surreality of menopause.Liz Lochhead described her 1995 debut, Powder Tower (Arc 1995), as “full of fabulous and exact fictions about ordinary family life”. Writer Robert Macfarlane described her second book Party (Leviathan 2000) as “a very fine collection indeed”.

These poems have a touch as deft as the seamstresses and other craftspeople who populate the book. This collection the result of a collaboration between poet and artist, and has the focused detail of pen and ink sketches yet pulls into its parameters the wide world of mythologies, folklore and personal narratives.

Award-winning poet, journalist, teacher and lecturer, Jackie Wills shares her experience of more than 20 years running workshops, and offers her personal insight into what works and why. In different settings – business, working in the community and schools – she outlines the pitfalls and risks in a wide-ranging handbook that no writing workshop leader should be without.

Jackie Wills brings a multitude of characters to these poems including a young man sleeping in his car, an amateur entomologist, bird catchers, her jilted aunt, Ray Dorset, the three Robins, the office cleaner, family, friends and several gardeners. Her poems move from the GP surgery to eye clinic, dance studio to allotment, back and forward in time and from Brighton's streets to the landscapes of South Africa. In this collection, a woman caught unawares by a changing body and attitudes as she ages strains to see the funny side of her last smear. But there are also many elegies and tributes to old friends in A Friable Earth, Wills' sixth collection of poems. Her work has been described as irreverent, bewitching, compassionate and surreal. She's written extensively about women's lives. She's also worked an allotment for 20 years.

We begin with a drive to write something that''s never been said before, to protest, to offload, to challenge or catch the zeitgeist. We imagine we write like the poets we admire. Slowly we learn the craft, understanding eventually that a writer is indentured for life.Drawing on decades of experience as a poet and tutor, this compelling book is part hands-on guide and part reflection on ways that poetry can make a difference to how we live. It is also a survey of many varied and inspirational writers, especially women poets from the end of the 20th century.The final section of this unique book offers starting points and resources that will prove essential for new and experienced poets alike. Jackie Wills is herself one of our most genuine and brilliantly insightful poets; and, as the sections on writing workshops show, she has helped people of all ages find their way into poetry.

Jackie Wills's fourth collection is arguably her strongest to date. Here are poems of love and disenchantment, poems about landscapes, both familiar and unfamiliar, poems in which the poet, with her acute powers of observation, looks at the 'ordinary' and redraws it in an extraordinary, even a disturbing, way. Commandments is divided into two distinct parts. The first part has two main points of focus: one is the Ten Commandments, each of which Jackie Wills re-states with such sensitivity and understanding that the impact is sometimes overwhelming; the other is the poet herself in poems which look inward but which have a universal relevance. The 'commandment' poems and what the poet refers to as the 'me' poems interweave in this first section to extraordinary effect. By contrast, the second part of the book consists of a cycle of landscape poems, largely about Wills's home territory, Brighton and its environs.Jackie Wills' first collection Powder Tower (Arc, 1995) was shortlisted for the 1995 T.S. Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her second collection, Party (Leviathan), was published in 2000 and her third, Fever Tree (Arc), in 2003. In 2004, Mslexia magazine named her one of the top ten new women poets of the decade and also in 2004, she was poet in residence at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.