A friable earth

by Jackie Wills

A Friable Earth

Jackie Wills brings a multitude of characters to these poems including a young man sleeping in his car, an amateur entomologist, bird catchers, her jilted aunt, Ray Dorset, the three Robins, the office cleaner, family, friends and several gardeners. Her poems move from the GP surgery to eye clinic, dance studio to allotment, back and forward in time and from Brighton's streets to the landscapes of South Africa. In this collection, a woman caught unawares by a changing body and attitudes as she ages strains to see the funny side of her last smear. But there are also many elegies and tributes to old friends in A Friable Earth, Wills' sixth collection of poems. Her work has been described as irreverent, bewitching, compassionate and surreal. She's written extensively about women's lives. She's also worked an allotment for 20 years

73 pages, Paperback

Published September 9, 2019

Reviews

[Maria Jastrzebska · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you pick up a new collection by Jackie Wills you know you’re going to be in safe hands even though the places she’ll take you are not going to be safe or comfortable. This is true of her latest collection A Friable Earth. In Considering I’ll Become Mud she tells us ‘It’s time to pay attention to microbes’– a timely call as every sane scientist has told us something similar – and she directs our attention to the minutiae of the earth, both in its decay and regeneration, where there is No News other than the earth’s own rhythms, the ‘steadiness of seeds’ (Allotment). She is at home focussing on fire ants, jellyfish, sloworms; in one of my favourite poems she carries spiders in her hair. But she is equally at home casting her eye on the human world, the frailties of our bodies, our ageing: her father’s unsteady heart which might ‘take off like a warbler, quietly, unnoticed’ (Letter from My Father), being a woman enduring her last smear, facing social ostracism. Her voice ranges, confident in narrative as well as distilled moment. Whether in Europe or South Africa, generations and timelines mingle, a young homeless man sleeping in a car, a daughter stunned into silence by the history of apartheid which would have directly impacted on her life only a few years previously, a young Syrian refugee lost at sea, all those most lonely and those departed, including a heart-breaking poem commemorating her estranged brother. Loneliness being harder to admit than chlamydia, as she points out in Lonely. These are letters to and from lost loves, lost friends, co-workers; this is music from songs we remember. This is a book about nature in its widest sense, about the earth which nourishes us and is itself, increasingly, a hungry mother and to which we ourselves, one day – sooner or later – return. Read it.

[Janet Sutherland · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful collection of poetry that I will keep coming back to. The poet begins by asking “Is there a quota of love for each of us”? (Last smear) The poems, indeed, are full of compassion for the earth, for living, for the people met along the way. In “Watering” Wills tells of a young man who lives in his silver Honda whom she meets on the way to water her allotment “I want him to know/the old elms are preparing to loosen their seeds/ and when they fall the streets feel softer,/ that there’s an empty shed and fresh water.” I have many favourites in this collection including the poem called “Allotment” which is a hymn both to the earth and to the allotment in three 13 line stanza’s. It begins “Ian’s fire burns below the mist. I watch him snaffle/ a length of plank from another plot and hear it crack./ The moon above the road is blurred, I’m cold/ and it’s too dark to dig.” This poem exemplifies the strengths of the whole collection which is rooted in lived experience, rooted in the local “ We list the coffee shops on Lewes Road, /calculate the grounds they could provide”, in what is known and witnessed “ four wrens will prove the ecstasy of parenting”. The poetry is lyrical but grounded, political and unafraid. There are poems about aging, about lost time, the body getting older, about looking back, about the earth we live in, about family visits to South Africa, about people on the margins; The work is beautifully written, clear, moving. Highly recommended.

[Josephine Corcoran · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this, her sixth poetry collection, Jackie Wills moves through time, place and memory so that we are carried between the present and the past; car and train journeys across different continents; a British childhood home; different locations in South Africa; Brighton and the South Downs and elsewhere. Vital poems about our planet and life upon it.

[Jack Mckeever · Rating 4 out of 5]

The legendary British poet Jackie Wills relays ageing womanhood in beautiful style, smashing its taboo in western society along the way.

Here's my full review: https://worldbookhistory.blog/2021/01...