Jean Sprackland is a poet and writer whose work is characterized by its profound engagement with the natural world and human experience. Her poetry often explores the intricate connections between the inner life and the external environment, employing precise language and striking imagery. Through her writing, she seeks to capture ephemeral moments and reveal the beauty inherent in everyday existence. Her prose is lauded for its unflinching honesty and its capacity to evoke deep emotional responses in readers.
Yet they also reflect their living community - how in our restless, accelerated modern world, we are losing our sense of connection to the dead. Jean Sprackland - the prize-winning poet and author of Strands - travels back through her life, revisiting her once local graveyards.
Exploring themes of loss and obsession, this collection intertwines stories from three authors, each with a distinct setting. Jean Sprackland delves into the dreams of characters amidst the dunes and fairgrounds of Southport. Tim Cooke's narratives unfold in a decaying tower block in south Manchester, capturing the claustrophobic lives of its inhabitants. Meanwhile, Sean O'Brien presents voices of lost souls navigating the libraries and bars of Tyneside, creating a rich tapestry of interconnected lives and experiences.
Jean Sprackland's third collection describes a world in free-fall. Tilt is a collection of raw, distressed and beautiful poems, a hymn to the remarkable survival of things in the face of threat - for every degradation an epiphany, for every drowning a birth.
For every object left emptied of significance, bereft, Jean Sprackland shows us another that is charged and radiant with possibility - the possibility of miracles.
Strands describes a year's worth of walking on the ultimate beach: inter-tidal and constantly turning up revelations: mermaid's purses, lugworms, sea potatoes, messages in bottles, buried cars, beached whales and a perfect cup from a Cunard liner.
Some enquire into the natural world and our human place in it, by investigating hidden worlds within worlds: oak-apples, aphid-farms, firewood teeming with small life.