Jean Sprackland – författare

Strands describes a year's worth of walking on the ultimate beach: inter-tidal and constantly turning up revelations: mermaid's purses, lugworms, sea potatoes, messages in bottles, buried cars, beached whales and a perfect cup from a Cunard liner. This is a series of meditations prompted by walking on the wild estuarial beaches of Ainsdale Sands between Blackpool and Liverpool, Strands is about what is lost and buried then discovered, about all the things you find on a beach, dead or alive, about flotsam and jetsam, about mutability and transformation - about sea-change.

'A refreshingly original meditation... I wish I had written it myself' Literary ReviewGraveyards are oases: places of escape, peace and reflection. Liminal sites of commemoration, where the past is close enough to touch. Yet they also reflect their living community - how in our restless, accelerated modern world, we are losing our sense of connection to the dead.Jean Sprackland - the prize-winning poet and author of Strands - travels back through her life, revisiting her once local graveyards. In seeking out the stories of those who lived and died there, remembered and forgotten, she unearths what has been lost.

Familiar poems and almost unknown poems. Love poems and war poems. Funny poems and heartbroken poems. Poems that re-create the world we know and poems written on the dark side of the moon. Poetry by Heart is an essential collection of over 200 poems, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Emily Dickinson, from Christina Rossetti to Benjamin Zephaniah, all carefully chosen for their suitability for learning and reciting. This is an anthology which celebrates the age-old pleasure of reciting poems - an anthology for all ages to treasure.

Poetry by Heart - based on the hugely successful nationwide schools competition, 200 magical poems to learn by heart'The poems we learn stay with us for the rest of our lives. They become personal and invaluable, and what's more they are free gifts - there for the taking' Simon ArmitageTwo years ago former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion had the idea of setting up Poetry by Heart - a nationwide annual competition for secondary schools which asked contestants to learn two or three poems and be judged on their recitations, first at school level, then regional, then in a national final held at London's National Portrait Gallery. It's proved a huge success, with hundreds of schools participating in the first year, and numbers up by 20% in the second. Coinciding with the start of the third year of competition, and published on National Poetry Day whose theme coincidentally in 2014 is Recitation, this Poetry by Heart anthology brings together the pool of poems - 200 altogether - from which contestants make their choices. Specially picked by Motion and his three co-editors, these poems make up a treasure house - of almost-unknown poems and familiar poems from the mainstream; love poems and war poems; funny poems and heartbroken poems; poems that recreate the world we know and poems written on the dark side of the moon. And all chosen with a view to their being recited out loud.From William Wordsworth to Wilfred Owen, Emily Brontë to Elizabeth Bishop this wonderfully enjoyable anthology will be enjoyed by all ages and includes the best poets from the past to the present day. In a groundbreaking feature, the book includes QR codes which allow readers to use their mobile phones to listen to recordings of the poems - many of them specially recorded by the poets themselves. Sir Andrew Motion was Poet Laureate from 1999 till 2009, and is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, London. Jean Sprackland'sTilt won the Costa Poetry award in 2008. She is a Reader in Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. Julie Blake is co-Founder and Director of The Full English, an organization based in Bristol which provides support to teachers of English Literature. Mike Dixon is an educational consultant specializing in English in the classroom.

Strands describes a year's worth of walking on the ultimate beach: inter-tidal and constantly turning up revelations: mermaid's purses, lugworms, sea potatoes, messages in bottles, buried cars, beached whales and a perfect cup from a Cunard liner. This is a series of meditations prompted by walking on the wild estuarial beaches of Ainsdale Sands between Blackpool and Liverpool, Strands is about what is lost and buried then discovered, about all the things you find on a beach, dead or alive, about flotsam and jetsam, about mutability and transformation - about sea-change.

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 natterjack 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.

Though firmly rooted in the domestic, natural world, Jean Sprackland's poems are thrilling excursions into the lives that we live alongside our everyday ones: the lives we are aware of in dreams, in grief, in love. She shows us the vertigo and vulnerability of human experience with great clarity and precision, tenderness and care. These are vivid poems full of light and weather and water: a flooded forest, acid rain, an inland tidal wave, an ocean of broken glass; jellyfish washed up on the beach that 'lay like saints/ unharvested, luminous'. There is an arresting imagination at work here, one as relaxed and at home in an alternative world of babies in filing cabinets, light collectors or the visiting dead, as it is in the world we think we know: supermarkets, empty flats, the A580 from Liverpool to Manchester.Lucid, sensuous and informed by an unusually tactile curiosity, the poems in Hard Water mark the assured arrival of an important poet.

In her first collection since the Costa-winning Tilt, Jean Sprackland looks back at endings and beginnings: the end of a life, or of a marriage; old homes lived in and left, new homes discovered. There are poems that speak of the paralysis and bewilderment of knowing something is over, and of the strangely significant, almost votive nature of the things that are left behind: the biscuit tin ‘of old keys, decommissioned and sleeping’, the empty room fading ‘to a tinnitus of dust and dead wasps’.This is a book of transitions – domestic and emotional – and it explores how the experience of change is painful, disorientating, even catastrophic, but also profoundly necessary and revelatory. Change brings with it the hope that love can be recovered out of the ruins; change, in fact, is a creative, healing force that shows us we have been living among ruins – that even in the face of grief and loss there are ‘spectral futures / we must stride the ditch to reach’. Full of exact, vivid, clear-eyed observation of a world of failure and flux, Sleeping Keys also illuminates a future world beyond. For every object left emptied of significance, bereft, Jean Sprackland shows us another that is charged and radiant with possibility – the possibility of miracles.

'A refreshingly original meditation... I wish I had written it myself' Literary ReviewGraveyards are oases: places of escape, peace and reflection. Liminal sites of commemoration, where the past is close enough to touch. Yet they also reflect their living community - how in our restless, accelerated modern world, we are losing our sense of connection to the dead.Jean Sprackland - the prize-winning poet and author of Strands - travels back through her life, revisiting her once local graveyards. In seeking out the stories of those who lived and died there, remembered and forgotten, she unearths what has been lost.

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. Deeply engaged with the flux of the world, these poems are alert, precise and vividly memorable – listening to the ‘machine of spring/with all your levers thrown to max’, ‘hearing the long bones of the trees stretch and crack’.

'Elegant and deeply sensory' Katherine May, author of WinteringAn exhilarating leap into darkness in all its forms, enchantments and history: the new work of non-fiction from award-winning poet and writer Jean SpracklandDarkness can make the most ordinary activity feel adventurous. Open a door and step through it. You can’t see a thing: you could be anywhere. Step over the threshold, into the dark, and feel your way.We humans have a complicated relationship with the dark. We fear it, and make great efforts to blot it out. But we also long for it, especially if we live in cities, or remember the starry skies of our childhoods. Darkness opens us up to risk, delight and transformation. Is it possible to prise it free of its negative associations, which are as old as human thought itself?In her quest for a new, more intimate relationship with darkness, acclaimed poet and writer Jean Sprackland finds herself confronting some of the deepest – and darkest – questions about who we are and our place in the world. Drawing on memory and imagination, history and ecology, literature and myth, Night Vision is an expansive, thrilling journey into the true dark.

Brought to you by Penguin.An exhilarating leap into darkness in all its forms, enchantments and history: the new work of non-fiction from award-winning poet and writer Jean SpracklandDarkness can make the most ordinary activity feel adventurous. Open a door and step through it. You can't see a thing: you could be anywhere. Step over the threshold, into the dark, and feel your way.We humans have a complicated relationship with the dark. We fear it, and make great efforts to blot it out. But we also long for it, especially if we live in cities, or remember the starry skies of our childhoods. Darkness opens us up to risk, delight and transformation. Is it possible to prise it free of its negative associations, which are as old as human thought itself?In her quest for a new, more intimate relationship with darkness, acclaimed poet and writer Jean Sprackland finds herself confronting some of the deepest - and darkest - questions about who we are and our place in the world. Drawing on memory and imagination, history and ecology, literature and myth, Night Vision is an expansive, thrilling journey into the true dark.'Elegant and deeply sensory' Katherine May, author of Wintering(c) Jean Sprackland 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

A vital and vivid poetry collection about place, time, illness and recovery'This is a profound, enduring collection' Guardian, Best New PoetryEach of the three sections in Goyle, Chert, Mire focuses on one of the distinctive elements characteristic of the Blackdown Hills – a little-known, sparsely populated area straddling the border between Somerset and Devon – and in particular the remote springline valley where the author lives. In this unique landscape, relatively unchanged over the centuries, the past is so evident that it can come to seem indistinguishable from the present.Illness causes a similar slippage in an individual’s sense of time. The poems trace an overlapping narrative of meningitis and the cognitive symptoms – at once distorting and revelatory – that came in its aftermath.In company with Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes and Pauline Stainer, Goyle, Chert, Mire employs a tough lyricism and taut line to scrutinise the natural world through historical and personal lenses. Alert to texture and temperature, humanity and history, time passing and time standing still, these poems are a deep examination of landscape, body and mind.'Jean Sprackland’s poems are an uncommon pleasure to read' Observer‘Accessible but worth close reading, she is among the best of her generation’ Herald'She reinvents experience for us, while putting us in closer touch with it' George Szirtes

‘An elegant and deeply sensory exploration of darkness in all its forms’ Katherine May, author of WinteringAn exhilarating leap into darkness: the new work of non-fiction from award-winning poet and writer Jean SpracklandIn her search for a new, more intimate relationship with darkness, acclaimed poet and writer Jean Sprackland confronts some of the deepest – and darkest – questions about who we are and our place in the world.With glimmering prose that draws on memory and imagination, history and ecology, literature and myth, Night Vision is an expansive, thrilling journey into the true dark.‘Stylish and crammed with memorable details’ Robert Crawford, author of Old World'In this lyrical series of essays, Jean Sprackland falls in love with the dark... Evocative and ambitious' Irish Times

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. Deeply engaged with the flux of the world, these poems are alert, precise and vividly memorable – listening to the ‘machine of spring/with all your levers thrown to max’, ‘hearing the long bones of the trees stretch and crack’.

'Elegant and deeply sensory' Katherine May, author of WinteringAn exhilarating leap into darkness in all its forms, enchantments and history: the new work of non-fiction from award-winning poet and writer Jean SpracklandDarkness can make the most ordinary activity feel adventurous. Open a door and step through it. You can’t see a thing: you could be anywhere. Step over the threshold, into the dark, and feel your way.We humans have a complicated relationship with the dark. We fear it, and make great efforts to blot it out. But we also long for it, especially if we live in cities, or remember the starry skies of our childhoods. Darkness opens us up to risk, delight and transformation. Is it possible to prise it free of its negative associations, which are as old as human thought itself?In her quest for a new, more intimate relationship with darkness, acclaimed poet and writer Jean Sprackland finds herself confronting some of the deepest – and darkest – questions about who we are and our place in the world. Drawing on memory and imagination, history and ecology, literature and myth, Night Vision is an expansive, thrilling journey into the true dark.

A vital and vivid poetry collection about place, time, illness and recovery'This is a profound, enduring collection' Guardian, Best New PoetryEach of the three sections in Goyle, Chert, Mire focuses on one of the distinctive elements characteristic of the Blackdown Hills – a little-known, sparsely populated area straddling the border between Somerset and Devon – and in particular the remote springline valley where the author lives. In this unique landscape, relatively unchanged over the centuries, the past is so evident that it can come to seem indistinguishable from the present.Illness causes a similar slippage in an individual’s sense of time. The poems trace an overlapping narrative of meningitis and the cognitive symptoms – at once distorting and revelatory – that came in its aftermath.In company with Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes and Pauline Stainer, Goyle, Chert, Mire employs a tough lyricism and taut line to scrutinise the natural world through historical and personal lenses. Alert to texture and temperature, humanity and history, time passing and time standing still, these poems are a deep examination of landscape, body and mind.'Jean Sprackland’s poems are an uncommon pleasure to read' Observer‘Accessible but worth close reading, she is among the best of her generation’ Herald'She reinvents experience for us, while putting us in closer touch with it' George Szirtes

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 natterjack 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.

In her first collection since the Costa-winning Tilt, Jean Sprackland looks back at endings and beginnings: the end of a life, or of a marriage; old homes lived in and left, new homes discovered. There are poems that speak of the paralysis and bewilderment of knowing something is over, and of the strangely significant, almost votive nature of the things that are left behind: the biscuit tin ‘of old keys, decommissioned and sleeping’, the empty room fading ‘to a tinnitus of dust and dead wasps’.This is a book of transitions – domestic and emotional – and it explores how the experience of change is painful, disorientating, even catastrophic, but also profoundly necessary and revelatory. Change brings with it the hope that love can be recovered out of the ruins; change, in fact, is a creative, healing force that shows us we have been living among ruins – that even in the face of grief and loss there are ‘spectral futures / we must stride the ditch to reach’. Full of exact, vivid, clear-eyed observation of a world of failure and flux, Sleeping Keys also illuminates a future world beyond. For every object left emptied of significance, bereft, Jean Sprackland shows us another that is charged and radiant with possibility – the possibility of miracles.