Skip to main content

OUR EYEWEAR REVIEW OF THE TS ELIOT-WINNING COLLECTION JACKSELF


by Jacob Polley
REVIEWED BY ROSANNA HILDYARD

Jackself is a scarecrow made up of lean meat and fat, frost, daws, lanterns, digestive biscuits, roundabouts and cow parsley. Jackself is Polley’s alter ego in this series of narrative poems, which work equally well individually as they do patchworked into a collection. Jackself is a wild pagan figure, a wodwo from ancient England, Jackself follows a snotty teenager growing up around the crumbling farms of Lamanby, in Cumbria.

Although Jackself is a hodgepodge of tones and references, it forms a remarkably coherent collection when read end to end. It is structured as a poetic bildungsroman, charting Jackself’s loss of innocence as he comes to terms with grief. Jackself is the love story of two friends: Jackself of Lamanby and Jeremy Wren, who bully and wrangle with each other, go fishing in Lamanby’s deserted tarns, and stay out at night to drink white cider and Malibu together ‘way out among the hedgerows’.

Jackself is lively, hilarious, cynical. In ‘Les Symbolistes’, Polley has Jackself, describe eating his own father as though in some weird rite: ‘carved so thin / I could read a rose-tinted poem through each slice’. It is a precisely conjured image, both disgusting and authentically symboliste. Yet it is Jeremy’s response that brings this scene to life:

 

A POEM! Wren roars

you’re creepy as a two-headed calf

and I’ve always thought so.

Poetic preening undercut. In fact, Polley does not have much time for self-conscious literariness: another moment comes in ‘Jack O’Lantern’, in which Jackself wishes to chronicle a frightening autumn night featuring ‘bedlamites’, ‘banging’ wind and dead ‘apple cores’ in a childish quatrain. But each time he tries to form his verse, the nursery-rhyme rhythm is broken, visually and rhythmically, with irritation:

 

the wind’s inside the apple core

the moon bangs like a drum

and         no           again      the sky’s a door

the year a slum

 

Jackself’s stubborn refusal to give up becomes increasingly funny as the truncated poem continues, reflecting a clash between teenage perfectionism and writer’s block.

Yet for all the humour, Jackself is bleak. This is a poetry book about the failure of poetry, of inarticulacy and two people’s inability to speak to each other. It is almost no surprise when, midway through the book, a fuming Wren suddenly turns on Jackself:

 

I’ll show you, he says

and he storms home, stamps upstairs,

throws a dressing-gown cord

over the rafter in his bedroom,

pulls the slipknot over his head

 

abruptly, leaving no note of explanation or farewell. Jackself is left dumb.

If Jackself has faults, they are due to its own inventiveness. Written as nursery rhymes, riddles, and cautionary fables, Polley must navigate several traditional genres of anonymous English literature as well as rushing through his particular narrative of a specific time and place. At times, telling apart the story of England’s Everyman Jacks from Polley’s own Jackself can be confusing. Yet on the whole, the narrative structure, each poem jumping from Jack to Jack, O’Lantern to Snipe, holds up well. Polley’s control over these deceptively simple forms and genres and his sense for aural and visual space, means that his poetry can bear the weight of intensely imagined language.

This year’s line-up for the T.S. Eliot Prize was a particularly rich one, but did appear to show a lean towards poets from the Reiver country and the North of England – J.O. Morgan from the Scottish Borders, Ian Duhig in the Vale of York, and Ruby Robinson and Katharine Towers from Sheffield. Polley, who lives and works in Newcastle, has been nominated twice before for the T.S. Eliot Prize, but it is Jackself that has finally won it for him – and in a collection which celebrates chance, superstition and English, colloquial tursn of phrase, it seems fitting that it is third time lucky.


Rosanna Hildyard is an editor at Eyewear Publishing, and a graduate of Oxford university. She is a writer and critic, currently living in Brixton.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".