Pelt

Reviews / Votes

'Sarah Jackson's poems are dark, strange stories, immaculately crafted. Surprising, dextrous, sometimes shocking, they compel the reader into uncertain territory. This is an assured first collection from a cool and original new voice' - Polly Clark. 'These poems have a dream-like, hallucinatory quality. Intriguing and mysterious, they transform childhood memory, myth, experiences of place, everything Sarah Jackson draws on for material into surreal and vivid narratives' - Vicki Feaver. 'Sarah Jackson's "Pelt" is out on its own. At once peirastic and assured, these are poems of disturbing grace and power. The title-word is already disorientating: a sense of speed and assault goes with the skin and fur of what is, perhaps, not or no longer or no longer only human. Jackson's poems have a compelling strangeness, uncomfortably intimate and elusive at the same time. You are not sure what distance to occupy in relation to them. It is a poetry of glints and disclosures, by turns gentle and menacing, diurnal and surreal, erotic and deranged. In radical and original fashion, Pelt prompts feelings "we can neither know / nor name". Here is a new voice, a pelting of voices in English poetry' - Nicholas Royle.