Tuesday Poem

The poem at Tuesday Poem this week is 'At Night in the House' by the English poet, Jean Sprackland, from her collection, Sleeping Keys.

This week's editor, Kathleen Jones, says of her choice:

'At Night in the House' grabbed my attention because my home in England is on the banks of a big, wild river and the sound of it permeates my days and particularly the nights.  And the sound of it is something like a thread of memory bringing ‘the golden barges   the dead griefs   and the quick fishes’. In the poem this river is a metaphor for something else - solitariness, reflection, the freight of a life lived, ‘the old wharves won smooth/ by all the moorings made there’, those barges, ‘with their forgotten cargoes’.

The river is a life-force, sometimes angry, sometimes placid, both erotic and disturbing, but always powerful, a source of creativity and passion.  I know very well the ‘twelve slithery steps/cut into the dripping wall’ and the trees that ‘lean in/like conspirators’.   And I have lain in bed, awake, in the darkness of 3am and felt this . . .

'In the night house
       she is nothing but riverbanks
               all she can feel is river
                     drawn through her
                                like a green rope.'

Jean Sprackland won the Costa Award for poetry in 2007 with her first collection,Tilt.   She is also one of the few poets in the UK to be published by a major international publisher, Random House. Jean Sprackland is currently Reader in Poetry at Manchester University and a trustee of the National Poetry Archive.  Her books have been short-listed for all the major poetry awards including the T.S. Eliot Prize.  Her meditation on walking the shoreline, Strands, won the Portico Prize for non-fiction.

This week's editor, Kathleen Jones, is an English poet, biographer and novelist living in Italy.  Her first full collection Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21 was published by Templar in 2011.  She blogs at 'A Writer's Life' and has a website at www.kathleenjones.co.uk