Polley’s haunting verse narrative blends nursery rhymes, riddles and cautionary tales with a dash of Coleridge
Instead of the onerous first person – the “I” from which most autobiographical narratives hang – Jacob Polley entrusts his story to figures from nursery rhyme, cautionary tales and riddles. Jackself, his fourth collection and the recent, unexpected – and in every way deserving – winner of the TS Eliot prize, opens with a quotation from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sonnet“My own heart let me have more pity on”, a line that gives the book its title: “Soul, self; come, poor Jackself”.
Polley has recruited a crowd of Jacks – Frost, Sprat, O’Lantern – and they offer a fleeting but false sense of security. As every close reader of nursery rhymes knows, unsafety is often their defining quality, the sinister never far away.
Related: 2016 TS Eliot prize won by Jacob Polley's 'firecracker of a book'
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