Festival Event: Jean Sprackland - Night Visions/Goyle, Chert, Mire

Jean Sprackland will talk about here recent non-fiction book Night Visions and her read from her noew poetry collection, Goyle, Chert and Mire.
Night Visions
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? Drawing on memory and imagination, history and ecology, literature and myth, Night Vision is an expansive, thrilling journey into the true dark. 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.
Goyle,Chert,Mire
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.