Ben Wilkinson reviews Tilt by Jean Sprackland

In Jean Sprackland’s second collection, Hard Water, the title poem equated the water of her English Midlands hometown, Burton-upon-Trent, with the language and attitude of the place itself: ‘Flat. Straight. Like the vowels, / like the straight talk: hey up me duck’. Here was water described as being at once ‘fierce’ and ‘lovely’, ‘marking [the poet] for life / as belonging, regardless’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Sprackland’s third collection continues with a predilection for all things liquid, fluid and transient, but where water previously figured as a convenient metaphor with which to explore personal, familial and more general human relations, Tilt broadens its scope to include the politically charged arena of environmental concerns. In ‘Bracken’, for example, a metaphorical appraisal of humanity’s nature vis-à-vis nature itself is offered, while the collection’s title poem, a sequence on ecological change, explores an oil spill given ‘freak weather’, the ‘sound at the edge of the dark’ signalling the polar ice caps ‘ticking’, and finds its highlight in the voice of an ageing scientist:

What we’re seeing is something immense
but distant, a galactic event,
a cosmic wobble, a glitch
on the Milankovitch Cycle.
The Earth nudged off its axis
like a wheel skewed on its axle. See,

our planet is bored and oblique. It sits
on the lip of the dark. Then flick!
Like a needle skipping the groove.

The Milankovitch Cycle, for those as well versed in orbital forces as myself, is a theory that proposes that variations in the Earth’s orbit account for the cyclical climate changes experienced over tens of thousands of years. As a theory, it is not yet fully expounded, and Sprackland carefully exploits this: the narrator noting that ‘the maths was slightly out. / We’d been working on old assumptions / and flawed equations.’ Critics might argue, as a result, that the poem lacks any added dimension or real purpose: merely observing the obvious uncertainty surrounding global warming for its own sake. But this would be to ignore the way in which Sprackland carefully invokes the tilt of the Earth’s axis through the unpacking of uneasy half rhymes: ‘immense’, ‘distant’, ‘event’; ‘wobble, ‘cycle’, ‘axis’, ‘axle’; through ‘oblique, ‘lip’ and ‘flick’. Combined with the absent ‘good question’ that the scientist narrator awkwardly acknowledges, then, actively drawing the reader into the poem, and this has the end effect of subtly drawing our attention to the crux of the matter: that we should acknowledge and remedy our impact on the environment, but avoid becoming embroiled in global warming’s complex causes and effects, when, as the poem notes, ‘theoretically, / everything’ has an impact on the fine cosmic balance that our world hangs in.

In fact, it must be noted that Sprackland’s poetry lends itself well to such uncertainties and confusions, and most satisfyingly, their elucidation and near resolution, given her poems’ combination of ordinary yet subtly musical language with the mystical and mysterious otherness that often haunts them. Tilt’s opening poem, ‘The Fenced Wood’, for instance, harbours an eerie, surreal quality in its scatter of short, deceptively simple, image-rich lines, while in ‘Fogbound’, the blurred images of lovers in bed are effortlessly merged with those of a lost ship, ‘drifting / beyond the range of foghorn and lighthouse, / slid[ing] into blind navigation.’ That said, however, Sprackland’s poetry is often at its best when observing the profound in the plain, the everyday, and the ordinary. ‘Birthday Poem’ is one such example, recalling ‘a roll of blue silk / left on the edge of the counter’, a ‘frail equation’ that ‘shimmered’ before ‘the silk shifted, or the spool relinquished it’. The rest of the poem devotes itself to describing the silk ‘unsleeving’, ‘a torrent / flashing over and pooling beneath’, before the narrator recalls it ‘halfway through [his or her] life’: ‘Its choice to spill. / Acceleration. Rapture.’ While it may not be as linguistically rich, charged, or as stylistically exciting as some contemporary poetry, then, the poem’s message – that the simple moment can reflect, impact upon, or even help to clarify the complex lifetime – is a fitting description of the achievements of Sprackland’s lyric poems: a poetic that never strives after its effects but allows itself to unfold quietly and impressively, with both a certain poise and a measured luminosity.

The more unusual and experimental poems within the collection are also impressive. The six-part ‘Miracles’ offers interesting and contemporary versions of Christ’s walking on water, healings, and transformation of water into wine, for instance, ‘Exorcised’ making for a shocking, quasi-fantastical story of ‘a demon’, ‘staked to a man’ who, if ‘he takes another, […] you must / set fire to the house, pull off her head // or stave in her eyes with your fingers’. Let it not be said that Sprackland’s poetry lacks verve or surprise. Elsewhere, the prose poem ‘Dried Fish’ makes for one of the collection’s surprise highlights: its stumbling, stream-of-consciousness narrative proving that Sprackland is as adept with freer experimental verse as she is with the taut, finely-wrought concision that marks so much of her work. It would certainly be a welcome and fruitful progression if more poetry of the former kind were to develop in her future collections.

If Tilt as a collection has any substantial flaws, then, they lie in the flatness and inconsequentiality of some of Sprackland’s verse. Where ‘The Source’ takes its exactitude and staunch precision as a point from which to unravel the beauty and mystery of nature, for example, bringing it back to its gritty insides and basics (‘a small heap of tricks’), successfully marrying the poem’s sound and sense, conversely ‘Breaking the Fall’ gives no real sense of water’s cumulative power: its ‘shatter[ing] into beads that fire away / at more or less predictable angles’ being an accurate summary of the poem itself. Despite its vivid and curious descriptions of the endangered natterjack toad and its breeding habits, it is also difficult to see why ‘The Birkdale Nightingale’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Poem, providing little more than a brief insight into a dying species, as set against the backdrop of human attempts to save them.

On the whole, however, Tilt is an assured and convincing book of poems from a poet of incisive wit and subtle intelligence. While the language remains simplified and is generally accessible throughout, the thematic scope of the collection often dazzles in its range and ambition: water may remain an ever-present feature, but of the poems not mentioned here, subjects as varied as alarm clocks, street sellers, the Big Bang and service stations demonstrate the extent of Sprackland’s concerns and abilities. Whatever the subject, though, Tilt is ultimately a collection that revels in exploring the fragile, the off-kilter, and the waveringly uncertain, wherever and however they may appear. I only hope that where the future of Sprackland’s work is concerned, her poetry pushes itself beyond such hesitations, and into the tantalising unknowns alluded to in this collection’s finer moments.

Jean Sprackland, Tilt. Jonathan Cape, £9.00

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.