Jacob Polley

Third time lucky: having twice previously been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Jacob Polley won Britain’s most prestigious poetry award for his remarkable work of folkloric imaginaton, Jackself (2016). Of course, this was more fine judgement than luck, as such nominations, even for his first collection The Brink (2003), indicate a consistently high level of achievement, in works that are at once challenging yet emotionally engaged. In a recent interview feature, journalist Aida Edemariam described Polley’s speaking voice as ‘by turns mischievous, demotic, direct – and funny’. (The Guardian, 2017). This is surely the voice or persona that Polley brings to his poems. There’s also a quality of compelling dark Northernness, in some ways reminiscent of Ted Hughes, drawing upon scenes from rural or marginal lives, their characters often cast amidst the bleak natural world.     

He began to mark out his territory in The Brink, in poems that proceed from compressed imagery and observational distillation. A jar of honey, for instance, is ‘like a lit bulb,/ a pound of light’ then ‘it’s the sun, all flesh and no bones’, except for ‘the floating knuckle/ of honeycomb’. Writing in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin (Winter 2003), Polley drew attention to what he called the book’s ‘watery schematics’, a succession of poems about rain, snow, or, as in ‘The North-South Divide’, a Britain underwater, in which ‘cod roam / the East Anglian plains, kelp / throttles Sherwood, the chimneys / of the Midlands slowly barnacle’.

He doesn’t mention the large shadow one sees falling on numerous summonings up of birds, rivers and fish; most Hughesian is ‘the pike, deep in the poem/ of its own prehistory’, and ‘The Crow’ ‘blackened into life’. Or, yet another crow, ’spilling its wings/ from its own inkstand’ (‘The Boast’). But Polley also brilliantly distills analogies from nature for sensuality that are distinctively his own poems: ‘So what should you care // if I dipped one hand into the current / and changed the course of your black hair, / the better to hold my breath to your throat?’ (‘The Distance’)

Little Gods (2006) can be seen to continue setting the human world alongside the natural world. The book’s title is almost hidden away within the opening poem, ‘The Owls’, such ominous birds being also ‘children out late / or lost, their voices worn away’. In a memorable image of familial bleakness, ‘Their voices are as empty / and unlovable as glass / and no one calls into the trees’. This seems to encapsulate what Polley stated was his intention, ‘a poem that crystallizes a particular enigmatic experience’ (Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Winter 2006). As do the five stanzas of ‘Rain’, a rhetorical tour-de-force of repetitions, rhymes both end-stopped and internal, half-rhymes, assonance and alliteration: all these devices giving a sense of movement, a liquid lilt, quite transforming the banality of - rain. The beautiful poem ‘Dandelions’ by contrast is as delicate as the flower but more pointed by analogy, addressed to a lover ‘for the time we have left’ and containing ‘all I could recover / of those frail innumerable summer moons’.       

Despite showcasing his now trademark subjects of rain, snow, the natural world and love/ love-gone-wrong poems, The Havocs (2012) marked something of a shift in Polley’s work. There are overt elements drawn from myths and folklore, use of ballad form, riddles, and free versions of pre-existing poems, some modern (for instance reconfiguring a phrase of Tom Paulin’s) or even, in ‘The Ruin’, Anglo Saxon. The ballads are especially striking, notably ‘Langley Lane’, in which a mother addresses her son who has been perhaps fatally stabbed. The following poem reverses things, as a small boy fearfully holds his mother’s hand: ‘The river’s spent its silver. / The day’s a bolted door. // You’ll get back nothing tomorrow / you touched or heard or saw. / The bridge we cross is sorrow’s / and this is sorrow’s law’.

Polley’s novel Talk of the Town (2009) had already appeared, set in and around the rural environs of his native Carlisle, revolving around the consequences of a terrible act of violence in which a vagrant (‘the giffer’) died after being set on fire in a local park. Its intense and fearful atmosphere is conveyed through ‘knackered and twitchy’ teenage narrator Chris, in Cumbrian dialect at once crudely demotic yet poetic: ‘the estuary crinkled. The unmovin hills across the watter loomed’. His best mate Arthur has gone missing and Chris sets out to find him, and to find out the truth of what happened. Being a poet’s novel, we look for the ‘texture’ of the writing, its imagery, as well as control of narrative tension and character study. It scores highly on all these counts, working up scenes of claustrophobic anxiety, lyrical episodes, and memorable villains such as gross hardman Booby Grove (‘his man’s face white as lard and the town like a toytown he can kick ovver ter find us’). There’s also a nice poetry in-joke: the two police officers who interview Chris are called Hughes and Harrison.         

Aida Edemariam speculates that in its essence, the precarious existences of two teenage friends, the novel may have made Jackself ‘possible’. (The Guardian, 2017) But as a work of great dexterity in imaginative psychological layers, the sequence defies any literal or realistic interpretation. Jackself and his madcap accomplice Jeremy Wren are indeed beset by the anxieties and behaviours of teenage boys but are also symbolical figures, associated with wildlife or folklore. And literature: the name Jackself is borrowed from a line by G.M. Hopkins. There may perhaps be a more recent influence: John Berryman’s The Dream Songs (1969), admittedly a far more massive sequence but a model of ongoing dialogue between two voices, by turns playful or menacing, agonising about matters of life and death. Polley has mentioned Berryman as an early love.   

Over its course of songlike dramas and dilemmas there are all kinds of Jack, including Sprat, Jack Frost, Jack-o-Lanterns, jackdaws, Applejack, and finally Jack O’Bedlam. Jackself ‘in his toadskin hat’ is ‘a soft-lad, a quick-/ tear, a worry-wit’. Jeremy Wren through death is transfigured into the bird his name suggests, ‘hopping on the window ledge / come out, come out, he cries / poor Jackself swears / there’s no one there’. Remarkably, drunk on white cider and Malibu, what they argue about is poetry, and Wren addresses Jackself as he vomits: ‘that’s a proper poem for you / agony to bring up, / with real carrots in it’ (‘Les Symbolistes’).

Persistent rain and watery variety soaks through the book, and it’s tempting to see Polley standing like Jackself ‘under Lamanby’s dripping eaves / to ask all / his dark questions in one go’ (‘Blackjack’). He is now recognized as one of his generation’s most compelling voices, a poet building his own world for us book by book. His are uncomfortable scenarios but sublime in suggestion; for him, a poem ‘often leaves us … shivering suddenly outside the back gate, while our coats are slung over the garden wall’ (Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Winter 2003).  

Jules Smith, 2017