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Hard Water
Though firmly rooted in the domestic, natural world, Jean Sprackland's poems are thrilling excursions into the lives that we live alongside our everyday 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 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 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.
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published July 28, 2003
32 people want to read
About the author
Jean Sprackland
22 books24 followersJean Sprackland is a poet and writer. She is the winner of the Costa Poetry Award in 2008, and the Portico Prize for Non-Fiction in 2012. Her books have also been shortlisted for the Forward Prize, the TS Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Award.
Jean is Reader in Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.
She is a trustee of the Poetry Archive, the world’s premier online collection of recordings of poets reading their work.
Jean has worked as a consultant and project manager for organisations involved with literature and education. She has held residencies in schools and universities, and is a tutor for the Arvon Foundation.
She lives in London.
Jean is Reader in Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.
She is a trustee of the Poetry Archive, the world’s premier online collection of recordings of poets reading their work.
Jean has worked as a consultant and project manager for organisations involved with literature and education. She has held residencies in schools and universities, and is a tutor for the Arvon Foundation.
She lives in London.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 30, 2014
This is hands down the most exciting collection of poems to cross my path all year. Quirky without being the slightest bit shallow. Acutely observant without being analytical. These creations are so beautifully intelligent in the way that they turn the world on its head to make far more sense of it. Every offering here is as original as the last. I am literally stunned by these poems. They have had me awe struck and giggling for two days and I have had to pace myself to savor them.
May 4, 2018
One of the poetry books I’ve enjoyed from my local library recently is Hard Water by Jean Sprackland (2003). Sprackland’s poetry is fabulous – Northern, conversational, grimly amusing, unpretentious, but also thematically and lexically ambitious, with dazzling use of imagery and staggeringly powerful exploitation of ambiguity.
Some of these poems are (presumably autobiographical)coming-of-age poems, capturing the part-tentative, part-swaggering nature of nascent female sexuality, such as ‘Shock’, where “Remember those thrills, the charge/ that went cracking through you?” alludes literally to the electric fence that her childhood friend dared her to touch, the homoerotic excitement of the dangerous friendship and the thrill of testing boundaries and finding your own way in the world, beyond adult rules. ‘Shadow Photograph’ captures the conflicting arousal and awkwardness of an early sexual encounter with a boy, “the first to try to define me with his tongue” (ooh! The double meaning there!) , “who was not the one, it was all wrong”, torn between the impulse to “kick the door open/scramble out into the sunlight” and to give in to bodily need, “suddenly loosed into stillness/by that silvery flickering”. Others convey mature sexuality and motherhood.
Other aspects of female experience are explored in the second or third person. The boy jealously throwing his sister’s doll, with its “dangerous legs”, out of the window in ‘Barbie On The Roof’ is both acutely-observed realism and an apt symbol of how patriarchy acts to subdue women, the girl “stretching till her fingers ached” to get back what she wants, before eventually accepting confinement and defeat: “The girl grooms plastic ponies/and keeps the window shut.” In ‘The Hairdresser’s Across the Street’, the familiar realism of a hair salon becomes a symbolic site where women play a part that’s expected of them and where an older woman is left in discomfort with wet hair while the male stylist attends to something more important, a potent metaphor for ageing:
Do you know how it feels
to be left like that, the water running off your hair?
You don’t like to sit up and call for service.
A few bubbles fizz close to your ear.
You start to shiver. The muscles are tight
in the back of your neck.
But then there are imagined narratives, sometimes touching on magic realism, such as ‘Losing The Dark’, where Sprackland conjures the delight-turned-to-dystopia concept of a world where the sun inexplicably stops setting, ‘An old Friend Comes To Stay’, where a dead friend returns for a 48-hour mini-break, and ‘The Light Collector’, about a man who, er, collects different kinds of light:
The cryptic blue cast by a computer. The smash-and-grab
of camera flash. The blade of light under the door
Some of these poems are (presumably autobiographical)coming-of-age poems, capturing the part-tentative, part-swaggering nature of nascent female sexuality, such as ‘Shock’, where “Remember those thrills, the charge/ that went cracking through you?” alludes literally to the electric fence that her childhood friend dared her to touch, the homoerotic excitement of the dangerous friendship and the thrill of testing boundaries and finding your own way in the world, beyond adult rules. ‘Shadow Photograph’ captures the conflicting arousal and awkwardness of an early sexual encounter with a boy, “the first to try to define me with his tongue” (ooh! The double meaning there!) , “who was not the one, it was all wrong”, torn between the impulse to “kick the door open/scramble out into the sunlight” and to give in to bodily need, “suddenly loosed into stillness/by that silvery flickering”. Others convey mature sexuality and motherhood.
Other aspects of female experience are explored in the second or third person. The boy jealously throwing his sister’s doll, with its “dangerous legs”, out of the window in ‘Barbie On The Roof’ is both acutely-observed realism and an apt symbol of how patriarchy acts to subdue women, the girl “stretching till her fingers ached” to get back what she wants, before eventually accepting confinement and defeat: “The girl grooms plastic ponies/and keeps the window shut.” In ‘The Hairdresser’s Across the Street’, the familiar realism of a hair salon becomes a symbolic site where women play a part that’s expected of them and where an older woman is left in discomfort with wet hair while the male stylist attends to something more important, a potent metaphor for ageing:
Do you know how it feels
to be left like that, the water running off your hair?
You don’t like to sit up and call for service.
A few bubbles fizz close to your ear.
You start to shiver. The muscles are tight
in the back of your neck.
But then there are imagined narratives, sometimes touching on magic realism, such as ‘Losing The Dark’, where Sprackland conjures the delight-turned-to-dystopia concept of a world where the sun inexplicably stops setting, ‘An old Friend Comes To Stay’, where a dead friend returns for a 48-hour mini-break, and ‘The Light Collector’, about a man who, er, collects different kinds of light:
The cryptic blue cast by a computer. The smash-and-grab
of camera flash. The blade of light under the door
April 27, 2024
A very readable and enjoyable collection that I am sure I will return to quite a bit -few of the poems quite live up to the titular first poem that drew me to the collection but there were lots of great poems filled with a good amount of humour.
June 17, 2015
I have always had a love hate relationship with poetry but I still try to read a handful of poetry books a year. This jumped out at me at our local library and it's a handy quick filler of a read.
This honestly has to be one of the best collections of poetry I have read. There's not really a damp squid in there. Jean Sprackland's writing is fresh and quirky and, in places, reassuringly northern. Her writing reminds me of Billy Collins who is still my favourite modern day poet.
A few notable crackers: Hard Water, Caravan, Shocks, The Man Who Comes To Collect The Bottle Bank, The Light Collector and the unique and disturbing A Baby In The Filing Cabinet. I'd say the Light Collector is the pick of the bunch.
Overall a fab collection of poems.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews