These Silent Mansions

These Silent Mansions

A life in graveyards

Summary

'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.

Reviews

  • 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.
    Nigel Andrew, Literary Review

About the author

Jean Sprackland

Jean Sprackland is the author of five previous poetry collections, including Tilt, which won the 2007 Costa Poetry Award. She has also published a book of non-fiction, Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach, which won the 2012 Portico Prize. She lives in London.
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