Martha Sprackland – författare

Shortlisted for Costa Poetry Award 2020Shortlisted for Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2020Shortlisted for John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize 2021Included in the TLS Books of the Year 2020Included in The Telegraph's Poetry Book of the Month in May 2020Juana of Castile (commonly referred to as Juana la Loca – Joanna the Mad) was a sixteenth-century Queen of Spain, daughter of the instigators of the Inquisition. Conspired against, betrayed, imprisoned and usurped by her father, husband and son in turn, she lived much of her life confined at Tordesillas, and left almost nothing by way of a written record. The poems in Citadel are written by a composite ‘I’ – part Reformation-era monarch, part twenty-first century poet – brought together by a rupture in time as the result of ambiguous, traumatic events in the lives of two women separated by almost five hundred years. Across the distance between central Spain and the northwest coast of England these powerful, unsettling poems echo and double back, threading together the remembered places of childhood, the touchstones of pain, and the dreamscapes of an anxious, interior world. Symbolic objects – the cord, the telephone, eggs, a flashing blue light – make obsessive return, communication becoming increasingly difficult as the storm moves in over the sea. Citadel is a daring and luminous debut.**

Things are not always what they seem in these poems of trauma and transformation. Reflections and shape-shifters move through them: a child''s balloon like a fish with a hook in its mouth, a raven disturbingly alive and dead at the same time. Pain is tracked to a bad tooth, but the source is uncertain, the memory unstable and changeable; the picture splinters into refracted light. Remembering, refusing and reimagining create mirrors, doubles and oppositions that tangle the thread, rejecting the simple, single way back.