Pelt

Reading Sarah Jackson's debut collection of poems is an unsettling experience. Immediately the reader is launched into a world in which the uncanny is always breaking through, when in a single line we realize we are in a nightmare. The first section of "Pelt" largely treats of domestic life, but these household scenes reveal strange and often monstrous fathers, mothers, and children. In 'Ten O'Clock Horses', a daughter describes the end of a family evening: "First he snuffs the lamp. / Then he snuffs my mother. / She lands softly, like teeth." After reading 'Old Fatty Knees', the title elicits feelings of dread, and the horror comes to a pitch in the final poem of the section, 'Revolution'. After these powerful opening poems, Part II came as something of disappointment, as the poems turned to more predictable subjects, mainly based around various foreign trips taken by the speaker. Personally, I felt that many of these poems, although not bad, could have been left out to create a stronger volume as a whole. The sections which follow however, are once more enjoyable and the uncanniness continues. In 'November' the speaker is held in some sort of institution, with the poem ending thus: Some days, I plan to break out, but they say the walls are solid bone reinforced with white paper. Besides, I've seen their binoculars. Instead, I curl up like a nut. Yesterday, I found if I drop things they make a noise but never break. Later, I'll drop myself from the ceiling. A poem of apocalypse begins: "It starts when the children go blackberrying, / return with mouths smeared with milk.", and finally the genteel details in the opening verse of 'Turn Out the Light' add to the horror: And the heron-man will be watching you sleep. His long fingers will twist your neck, peel your scalp with his silver butter knife. Slowly, he will draw out your dream and crack it open on the side of his blue china teacup. As a fan of writers such as Shirley Jackson and Robert Aickman, Sarah Jackson's world was bound to appeal to me. The power of her poetry, however, does not just reside in its unsettling nature. I also savoured her descriptions of more familiar actions such as a mother's thumb which is 'a pumicestone mouse smiling my cheek'. I discovered this book after it was longlisted for the 2012 Guardian First Book Award. It is collection which can be read and re-read with much pleasure and deserves a wide readership.