Tattoos for Mother's Day
An collection of Jean Sprackland's early work.
“Lyrical poems of intense experience, severance, love and loss. Jean Sprackland writes with tingling emotional honesty… an extremely assured first collection.”
“A fine and moving book, a walk along the cliff edge… not comfortable but somehow comforting in the end.”
“The poems are like delicate webs, constructed from tensions, but tensions out of which love can be rescued, sometimes by the skin of its teeth.”
Buy direct from the author.
Published by Spike, 1997
ISBN 0-9518978-5-3
£4.99
DEADNETTLE
Sprawled under the hedge he snaps
the thin necks of deadnettle,
pinches the white sac, squirts
nectar into my mouth.
A small sweet promise on the tongue.
I run home in the heat. The smell
of melting tar, a stickiness underfoot.
The house whirrs and stutters with the machine.
She urges a small red dress to the needle.
She stops, examines me, stretches
to tug a snag of stickybud from my hair.
Be a good girl. She takes up the cloth
and snaps the thread on her teeth. Won’t you?