Full Description
A mesmerising portrait of the changing body and mind within the unchanging landscape, in the new poetry collection from award-winning Jean Sprackland
Goyle - a deep, narrow valley. Chert - a hard, opaque rock. Mire - an area of swampy earth. Each are features of the distinctive landscape of the Blackdown Hills - a little-known, sparsely populated area straddling the border between Somerset and Devon - where Jean Sprackland has lived for several years in a remote cottage. This unique landscape has remained relatively unchanged over the centuries, where the past is so evident that it can come to seem indistinguishable from the present.
Goyle, Chert, Mire is a sequence of sonnets about place, time, illness and recovery. They also trace an overlapping narrative in which illness causes a similar slippage in an individual's sense of time, drawn from Sprackland's experience of meningitis in 2020 and the cognitive symptoms that followed, which were both distorting and revelatory.
A deep examination of landscape, the body and the mind, Goyle, Chert, Mire is alert to texture and temperature, humanity and history, time passing and time standing still.
