Description
Book Synopsis"Behold" is Nicki Jackowska's seventh book of poetry. The title poem vividly evokes the history of the Holocaust with precise particulars and mundane details. Her European consciousness and working-class English roots give her writing an extraordinary spectrum of awareness. Many of the poems are akin to dramatic monologues, moving from a Lewes garden party to characters in a Brighton Terrace and thence to Krakuw. John Berger writes of the collection that 'Its grief has penetrated its syntax, and when there's that kind of penetration - it changes the reader's breathing.'
Trade ReviewJohn Berger writes of the collection that 'Its grief has penetrated its syntax, and when there's that kind of penetration - it changes the reader's breathing.' 'Nicki Jackowska combines her teeming psychic flora and fauna with hard outer experience in fascinating ways. She explores each with the other, makes beautiful fluid formations of the one as she develops submarine X-rays of the other. Her poems have a broad, deep focus through a language made up of antennae, sensors, aerials, nerve-tendrils and fronds - fluorescent and full of shifting reflections. They have the freshness of improvisations. They leave you with hard, often painful events, but go on breathing in their own tides, different every time you look at them.' Ted Hughes 'Nicki Jackowska's poems are - tough, gentle, wild, mysterious, magical and marvelous.' Adrian Mitchell
