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Reading lists

7 travel writers you need to know

In search of the true dark

Night Vision

An elegant and deeply sensory exploration of darkness in all its forms

Stylish and crammed with memorable details, Night Vision is the most lucid book about darkness you will ever read.

An intimate, questing, and deeply moving collection of nocturnal encounters, Jean Sprackland’s Night Vision is a stellar polyphony of vespertine voice and story. Illuminating and lyrical, equal parts uncanny and comforting, but always curious and humane, this book is essential reading for anybody wishing to become better acquainted with the night.

In this lyrical series of essays, Jean Sprackland falls in love with the dark... An evocative and ambitious study of a state that makes up half of human experience.

Jean Sprackland is the author of five poetry collections, including Tilt, which won the 2007 Costa Poetry Award. She has also published two works of non-fiction, Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach, which won the 2012 Portico Prize, and These Silent Mansions: A Life in Graveyards in 2020. Her forthcoming titles are Night Vision, a non-fiction exploration of darkness, in November 2025, and Goyle, Chert, Mire, her latest poetry collection, in April 2026.

'Elegant and deeply sensory' Katherine May, author of Wintering 
 
An exhilarating leap into darkness in all its forms, enchantments and history: the new work of non-fiction from award-winning poet and writer Jean Sprackland 
 
Darkness can make the most ordinary activity feel adventurous. Open a door and step through it. You can’t see a thing: you could be anywhere. Step over the threshold, into the dark, and feel your way. 
 
We humans have a complicated relationship with the dark. We fear it, and make great efforts to blot it out. But we also long for it, especially if we live in cities, or remember the starry skies of our childhoods. Darkness opens us up to risk, delight and transformation. Is it possible to prise it free of its negative associations, which are as old as human thought itself? 
 
In her quest for a new, more intimate relationship with darkness, acclaimed poet and writer Jean Sprackland finds herself confronting some of the deepest – and darkest – questions about who we are and our place in the world. Drawing on memory and imagination, history and ecology, literature and myth, Night Vision is an expansive, thrilling journey into the true dark.

A life in graveyards

These Silent Mansions

An intimate exploration of our abiding fascination with cemeteries and graveyards, from critically acclaimed poet Jean Sprackland

A wide-ranging, unpredictable and refreshingly original meditation on a huge but widely ignored subject: the relationship between the living and the dead… Exhilarating… This is a lovely book: beautifully written, never lapsing into self-conscious ‘poet’s prose’, always a joy to read. I wish I had written it myself.

Cemetery tales, filled with fascinating details and told with a poet’s skill… Delightfully morbid… Sprackland roves about history, language, biology, architecture, entomology, iconography and much else in her quest for meaning… [and] the astonishing twist…should justify your reading These Silent Mansions in its entirety.

Shot through with delightful digressions… There is a spare beauty to Sprackland’s prose… These Silent Mansions is a strange and mercurial book; hard to pin down, but even harder to forget.

Sprackland has the poet’s knack for atmosphere and a magician’s ability to conjure up other worlds. She is like a ghostly time traveller… Sprackland is particularly agile, though, at exploring the ways in which a graveyard reflects its community and how, with modern life, we are losing this sense of connection.

Part social history, part personal meditation and wholly enchanting - as attentive to local and moving details as it is to the fact of mortality itself.

Award-winning poet Sprackland takes a wonderfully wistful tour of her favourite cemeteries... A fascinating read.

To opened ground and graven stone Jean Sprackland brings a poet’s scrutiny and the archivist’s insatiable curiosity. She disinters the humanity buried in the humus; and how, as fungus and algae make the lichen bloom, the living and the dead must share the several geographies of time and memory, identity and story. These Silent Mansions, like silence “beyond silence listened for”, rings remarkable and true.

A deeply pleasurable blend of poetic anthropology… Against the inevitable forces of erasure, this small book serves as an act of defiance.

Each of these stories is told with Sprackland’s keen eye for detail... It is beautifully written as I have come to expect with all of her books, she has immensely powerful prose.

Part memoir, part nature study and part social history, Sprackland returns in this sensitive and unusual book to the graveyards of the towns and villages where she has lived… [Sprackland] connects us to the forgotten lives of those whose names, like Ebenezer and Chastity, are now eaten by moss and lichen…[and] discovers the tales…[of] collective history.

This gentle journey around England’s graveyards is anything but morbid. Jean Sprackland, who is also an award-winning poet, is less interested in death than in the stories that the departed have left behind: the lives and deeds remembered in stone and the way that churchyards help us situate ourselves in time and space… Wise, compassionate and involving.

Sprackland gets her bearings from graveyards. She does not really feel that she has touch down somewhere properly unless she has established more than a nodding acquaintance with the dead…in order to discover what part of her older self might have survived.

Thoughtful, wide-ranging, and unusually sparing in personal detail... the memories...are so vivid that they make the places, and the stories they contain, seem very real.

Jean Sprackland’s first book of non-fiction, Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach, won the 2012 Portico Prize. She is the author of five poetry collections, including Tilt, which won the 2007 Costa Poetry Award and, most recently, Green Noise (2018). She lives in London.

'A refreshingly original meditation... I wish I had written it myself' Literary Review 
 
Graveyards are oases: places of escape, peace and reflection. Liminal sites of commemoration, where the past is close enough to touch. Yet they also reflect their living community - how in our restless, accelerated modern world, we are losing our sense of connection to the dead. 
 
Jean Sprackland - the prize-winning poet and author of Strands - travels back through her life, revisiting her once local graveyards. In seeking out the stories of those who lived and died there, remembered and forgotten, she unearths what has been lost.

Green Noise

The new collection from the winner of the Costa Poetry Award

Sprackland likes to read the sign language of the natural world… These poems are exact and well made, their lightness of touch often given drive by a fierce vocabulary.

Jean Sprackland’s Green Noise has a tangy, earthy smell about it. She is a snooper on the natural world, a conspiratorial poet who upturns things to find out what’s odd about them and, almost incidentally, explores her own lostness as she goes.

Jean Sprackland is celebrated for her tactile, transformative poetry which makes the miraculous seem familiar and the domestic other-worldly. Her new collection is tuned to new and deeper frequencies. ‘Green noise’ is the mid-frequency component of white noise – what some have called the background noise of the world – and these poems listen for what is audible, and available to be known and understood, and what is not. Each poem is an attempt at location – in time, in place, in language. Some enquire into the natural world and our human place in it, by investigating hidden worlds within worlds: oak-apples, aphid-farms, firewood teeming with small life. Others go in search of fragments of a mythic and often brutal past: the lost haunts of childhood, abandoned villages, scraps of shared history which are only ever partially remembered. A physical relic or a mark on the landscape seems briefly to offer a portal, where a sounding is taken from present to past and back again. 
 
Deeply engaged with the flux of the world, these poems are alert, precise and vividly memorable – listening to the ‘machine of spring/with all your levers thrown to max’, ‘hearing the long bones of the trees stretch and crack’.

Sleeping Keys

The new collection from the Costa prize-winning Jean Sprackland

Assured and tactful… Sleeping Keys is a book distinguished by rueful but unembittered wisdom.

Full of poems that are unashamedly domestic.

The poems in this collection are short, terse, painful reflections on ends and beginnings… The later poems are ones of resilience, rebirth and hope.

Apparently simple, down to earth poems with deep, unexpected, surprising images... Every line, each word are loaded with meaning.

Poems scarred with the painful aftermath of a marital break-up and the wounded delight of new love. Anyone who has been through a divorce will recognise the language of these elegies. Sprackland’s tone sometimes reminds me of Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.

If you think poetry may not be for you, or perhaps you feel a bit out of step with it and can't think how or where to begin again then Sleeping Keys might be the way back in.

In her first collection since the Costa-winning Tilt, Jean Sprackland looks back at endings and beginnings: the end of a life, or of a marriage; old homes lived in and left, new homes discovered. There are poems that speak of the paralysis and bewilderment of knowing something is over, and of the strangely significant, almost votive nature of the things that are left behind: the biscuit tin ‘of old keys, decommissioned and sleeping’, the empty room fading ‘to a tinnitus of dust and dead wasps’. 
 
This is a book of transitions – domestic and emotional – and it explores how the experience of change is painful, disorientating, even catastrophic, but also profoundly necessary and revelatory. Change brings with it the hope that love can be recovered out of the ruins; change, in fact, is a creative, healing force that shows us we have been living among ruins – that even in the face of grief and loss there are ‘spectral futures / we must stride the ditch to reach’. 
 
Full of exact, vivid, clear-eyed observation of a world of failure and flux, Sleeping Keys also illuminates a future world beyond. For every object left emptied of significance, bereft, Jean Sprackland shows us another that is charged and radiant with possibility – the possibility of miracles.

A Year of Discoveries on the Beach

Strands

Featured on Radio 4 Book of the Week in 2012.  This is the ultimate beachcomber's book from a prize-winning poet and natural storyteller.  Think Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deakin.

A fine book… Transparent, undeceived prose

Compelling … well-contextualised, sharply-observed, clued up, environmentally aware and deeply researched

With clarity and candour, in the natural voice of a modern storyteller, she tells what she sees at the intersection of herself and whatever is delivered to her by the tide

Simply gorgeous ... One of the finest piece of writing, nature or otherwise, to emerge this year

If a book can have the appeal of a really good long walk, this one does

Strands describes a year's worth of walking on the ultimate beach: inter-tidal and constantly turning up revelations: mermaid's purses, lugworms, sea potatoes, messages in bottles, buried cars, beached whales and a perfect cup from a Cunard liner. 
 
This is a series of meditations prompted by walking on the wild estuarial beaches of Ainsdale Sands between Blackpool and Liverpool, Strands is about what is lost and buried then discovered, about all the things you find on a beach, dead or alive, about flotsam and jetsam, about mutability and transformation - about sea-change.

Hard Water

A brilliant young woman poet joins the Cape list.

This collection establishes Jean Sprackland as a definite new talent. These poems in Hard Water have the exhilarating quality of freshness and truth: poems of memory and place, religion and childhood, captured with relish in a textured and physical language. Added to this are a gift for the colloquial and a subtle, sexy humour. This is a hugely enjoyable collection by a poet writing with clear gusto and authority. Buy it- and then buy it for a friend

Jean Sprackland's poems reinvent the world with a wicked, michievous magic. Delighting in unsettling narratives and transformations, she turns the familiar landscape of everyday life into something instantly more compelling and mysterious- often anxious and troubling but always thrilling. There is an undeniable beauty at the dark heart of these poems

This is an exhilarating book; each poem a dazzling performance which shifts our perception of the world

Though firmly rooted in the domestic, natural world, Jean Sprackland's poems are thrilling excursions into the lives that we live alongside our everyday ones: the lives we are aware of in dreams, in grief, in love. She shows us the vertigo and vulnerability of human experience with great clarity and precision, tenderness and care. 
 
These are vivid poems full of light and weather and water: a flooded forest, acid rain, an inland tidal wave, an ocean of broken glass; jellyfish washed up on the beach that 'lay like saints/ unharvested, luminous'. 
 
There is an arresting imagination at work here, one as relaxed and at home in an alternative world of babies in filing cabinets, light collectors or the visiting dead, as it is in the world we think we know: supermarkets, empty flats, the A580 from Liverpool to Manchester. 
 
Lucid, sensuous and informed by an unusually tactile curiosity, the poems in Hard Water mark the assured arrival of an important poet.

Tilt

Winner of the 2007 Costa Poetry Award

Jean Sprackland's third collection describes a world in free-fall. Chaos and calamity are at our shoulder, in the shape of fire and flood, ice-storm and hurricane; trains stand still, zoos are abandoned, migrating birds lose their way - all surfaces are unreliable, all territories unmapped. 
 
These are poems that explore the ambivalence and dark unease of slippage and collapse, but they also carry a powerful sense of the miraculous made manifest amongst the ordinary: the mating of natterjack toads, ice on the beach ('dream stuff, with its own internal acoustic') or 'the fund of life' in a used contraceptive. Bracken may run wild across the planet 'waiting for the moment/to pounce on the accident/of the discarded match' but there are also the significant wonders of children and the natural beauty of the world they've inherited. Tilt is a collection of raw, distressed and beautiful poems, a hymn to the remarkable survival of things in the face of threat - for every degradation an epiphany, for every drowning a birth.

Jean Sprackland

A book-length sequence of poems about place, time, illness and recovery 
 
Each of the three sections in Goyle, Chert, Mire focuses on one of the distinctive elements characteristic of the Blackdown Hills – a little-known, sparsely populated area straddling the border between Somerset and Devon – and in particular the remote springline valley where the author lives. In this unique landscape, relatively unchanged over the centuries, the past is so evident that it can come to seem indistinguishable from the present. 
 
Illness causes a similar slippage in an individual’s sense of time. The poems trace an overlapping narrative of meningitis and the cognitive symptoms – at once distorting and revelatory – that came in its aftermath. 
 
In company with Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes and Pauline Stainer, Goyle, Chert, Mire employs a tough lyricism and taut line to scrutinise the natural world through historical and personal lenses. Alert to texture and temperature, humanity and history, time passing and time standing still, these poems are a deep examination of landscape, body and mind. 
 
'Jean Sprackland’s poems are an uncommon pleasure to read' Observer 
 
‘Accessible but worth close reading, she is among the best of her generation’ Herald

Jean Sprackland

Books by Jean Sprackland

Articles featuring Jean Sprackland

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