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Pelt

Pelt, long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award 2012 and winner of the 2013 Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize, builds on Jackson’s doctoral research on the ‘textual skin’ (2009) and her forthcoming monograph from Edinburgh University Press, Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing. Drawing significantly on Didier Anzieu’s conception of the ‘skin ego’ (1989), the poems in this volume investigate the ways that a psychological skin might work as a ‘unifying envelope for the self’. Negotiating Anzieu’s key themes of containment, inscription and the interface between inside and outside, the poems in this collection are particularly interested in the relationship between the body and the page, and what Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey term the skin’s ‘writerly effect’ (2001). The poems respond to a range of literary and critical material including work by Maurice Blanchot, Hélène Cixous, Carolyn Forché, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka, and take up, in particular, Jacques Derrida’s ‘law of tact’ (2005) and the sense of distance that haunts our experience of intimate contact. Exploring the relationship between language and the caress, Jackson’s research into Julia Kristeva’s ‘semiotic’ in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984) enables her to develop her theory of ‘tactile poetics’, where extra-verbal bodily energy emerges through rhythm and repetition to both unsettle meaning and ‘touch’ readers. Pelt has featured in a range of publications including the Guardian and Times Literary Supplement, and the poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb (2012) and Proms Plus Late from the Royal Albert Hall (2012). The collection was supported by the AHRC, the Arts Council England, and Cove Park Artist’s Centre (The Fielding Programme).