Poetry Book Society Translation Choice

The poetry of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, John of the Cross, has inspired and consoled for hundreds of years, influencing writers from James Joyce to Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill to T.S. Eliot and Mary Oppen. This new edition of his essential works, in a sensitive and luminous translation by Martha Sprackland, gathers John of the Cross’s complete poems and a selection of his prose, including from his extended commentary on the poem ‘Dark Night’. In his immediate, sensual writing, we see a soul searching for meaning and union with the divine: both meek and bold, deserving and undeserving, oscillating between light and dark, soaring and falling, desperation and salvation. Dark Night gives us a picture of faith at once confronting and inspiriting, and of the power of words as a means of spiritual transcendence.

Translated by Martha Sprackland, with an introduction by Colin Thompson.

‘Sprackland’s new translation of the poetry and meditative prose of the 16th-century mystic John of the Cross is both provocative and timely . . . the works themselves retain all the strangeness and burn that attracted TS Eliot and Salvador Dalí, Thomas Merton and Pope John Paul II.’ – Fiona Sampson, Guardian

‘Sprackland's ear is particularly alive to movement and music ... the result is a St John of the Cross who feels neither embalmed nor modernised, but newly legible. This translation doesn't simply carry the poems across languages; it reanimates them.’ – Leo Boix, PBS

Shortlisted for the John Pollard International Poetry Prize, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the Costa Poetry Award

Juana of Castile (commonly referred to as Juana la Loca – Joanna the Mad) was a sixteenth-century Queen of Spain, daughter of the instigators of the Inquisition. Conspired against, betrayed, imprisoned and usurped by her father, husband and son in turn, she lived much of her life confined at Tordesillas, and left almost nothing by way of a written record. The poems in Citadel are written by a composite ‘I’ – part Reformation-era monarch, part twenty-first century poet – brought together by a rupture in time as the result of ambiguous, traumatic events in the lives of two women separated by almost five hundred years. Across the distance between central Spain and the northwest coast of England these powerful, unsettling poems echo and double back, threading together the remembered places of childhood, the touchstones of pain, and the dreamscapes of an anxious, interior world. Symbolic objects – the cord, the telephone, eggs, a flashing blue light – make obsessive return, communication becoming increasingly difficult as the storm moves in over the sea. Citadel is a daring and luminous debut.

'So much fire comes to life in snapshots on these pages ... The images are electrifying. Something marvellous occurs: a domestic scene becomes “a blow to the head / enough to knock the earth from its orbit.” I love this book.' – Ilya Kaminsky

'Martha Sprackland's poems are virtuosic in their timing, texture, and detailed evocation. From poems of the hospital to poems of the shore, this is a fierce and fresh debut that rings with courage and intelligence. Citadel will seize you by the heart and lead you into deep and resonant territories, and when you return you will find yourself changed, strange to yourself, and wondrously enriched.' – Fiona Benson

'a spellbinding, time-travelling debut filled with imagination and mystery.' The Costa Award judges 2020

Shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award

Things are not always what they seem in these poems of trauma and transformation. Reflections and shape-shifters move through them: a child’s balloon like a fish with a hook in its mouth, a raven disturbingly alive and dead at the same time. Pain is tracked to a bad tooth, but the source is uncertain, the memory unstable and changeable; the picture 'splinters into refracted light'. Remembering, refusing and reimagining create mirrors, doubles and oppositions that tangle the thread, rejecting the simple, single way back.

'Sprackland’s words pierce through the mundanity of the everyday, creating intense emotional landscapes [...] With Milk Tooth, Sprackland continues to establish herself as one of Britain’s finest young poets.' – Robert Greer, London Magazine

'in that Plathian control, that cool presentation of event, vibrant, clustering images take hold and push through intimacy and address . . . Sprackland’s lyric voice is elastic, commodious . . . it bears evidence of its soldered edges, the violence of experience, an ethos of resistance delivered in crisp-cut lines whose intimations of gendered solidarity sting.' – Maria Sledmere, Poetry School

Longlisted for a Sabotage Award
London Review Bookshop Spring Picks

‘I caved him in with the heel of my shoe’ begins ‘Snail’, the tiniest act of accidental violence setting the tone for Sprackland’s pamphlet . . . Between poor Ron Sullivan, struck by lightning seven times, who ‘crackled when he walked’, and the fevered lover who radiates fire at night, this skinny volume of 8 poems explores the body in extremis.' – Julia Bird, The Poetry School Books of the Year 2017

"[With] formal acuity Martha Sprackland's 'Domestic' characterizes a broken relationship as helplessly frozen syntax teetering on that very word – as – everything that's just happened in a nameless quarrel 'as' something faraway, free of it, clear of it, like smoke or sky. Numbness of spent emotion, wonderfully anatomized: 'Glass as broken glass.'" – Glyn Maxwell

"Sprackland refreshes the domestic and mundane in poems which are outwardly calm, but lit from within to reveal unusual visionary angles." – Eric Gregory Award judges 2014

'In Glass As Broken Glass Martha Sprackland's poems thrum with a delicate fragility. These are words that push gently at life's fissures to reveal a quiet understanding of the splintered and fragmented nature of the world and our place in it.' – Sophie McKeand, Caught by the River

'Martha Sprackland is already a formidable technician. The sonnet is moved through quatrains and and a kind of terza rima, and there is deft and adept free verse. The result is a calm, taut surface to the poems which belies the heightened, sometimes gothic nature of the subject matter.' – Ian Pople, Manchester Review

'A poet of considerable creative powers, with astute diction and use of imagery, together with a tranquil repose in the sense of time and place . . . she is a poet with genuine talent and insight.' – Graham Hardie, London Grip

'[A] commanding teller of the strange stories of others . . . Sprackland's best poems have the power of an irresistible tide.' – Alison Brackenbury, PN Review

'[V]iolence or (in this case) "terrible dynamism" is figured with a tender precision . . . Sprackland forces a wonderful fascination upon her readers.' – Edwina Attlee,Poetry Review

'This debut pamphlet refuses to provide easy answers. It packs a lot into so little space.' – D. A. Prince, New Walk

'These are intriguing and provocative poems which will repay further attention . . . The poem which gives the pamphlet its title, ‘Domestic’, is allusive and atmospheric. Something has happened but we are not told what – a quarrel, a breakage, an injury, a declaration, a dissipation, a dull fact of damage, all conveyed in a series of images. The poem which has the most power is 'Superposition and Collapse' . . . It is stunning, recording a complex mix of baffled self-blame and grief.' – Elizabeth Rimmer, Sabotage Reviews