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Sleeping Keys

Sprackland’s fourth collection of poems takes the form of an extended sequence whose central concern is the concept of ‘home’ and our human relationship with it. The poems describe endings and beginnings: old homes lived in and left, new homes discovered; journeys from one life to another, and the votive nature of the things that are left behind. A four-part poem, Last Resort, grew out of research into the development of high-strength antibiotics, including contemporary accounts of the pioneering work of the biologist Edmund Kornfeld in the 1950s. This enabled Sprackland to investigate the hidden human dimension to the story of one of these ‘wonder drugs’. Other poems are rooted in a preoccupation with some less familiar and often enigmatic behaviours of living things (moths, wasps, fish, birds), and these draw on both field observation (in a variety of settings from the north west coast of England to the limestone gorges of the Languedoc) and sources in science and natural history, including Birds Britannica by Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey, An Elementary Study of Insects by Leonard Haseman and Why Birds Sing by David Rothenberg. The intention is to take a closer look, to draw attention to the extraordinary aspects of apparently ordinary things, to challenge and subvert our assumptions and make the familiar strange. The formal and technical aspects of these poems draw on a close engagement with Elizabeth Bishop’s work, especially her collections North and South and Questions of Travel; and on my reading of contemporary poets such as Alice Oswald, John Burnside, Jorie Graham, Maurice Riordan and Paul Farley, whose different approaches are helping to redefine ‘nature poetry’ by bringing a 21st century environmental awareness to the subject matter