Woman's Head as Jug

By Jackie Wills

Especially appealing to anyone interested in the visual arts, this new collection is the result of collaboration between poet Jackie Wills and painter Jane Fordham. The poems have a touch as deft as the seamstresses and other craftspeople who populate the book, before pulling out into the wider worlds of mythology, folklore and the visceral routine of daily life.

"She is at her best when most surprising, bringing flashes of the extraordinary to the everyday." – Christina Patterson, The Independent

"Her talent for thoughtful... observation, accompanied by brisk injections of the personal and the strikingly real, is indisputably clear." – Kate North
Jackie Wills's most recent poetry collection is Commandments (Arc, 2007). Her first, Powder Tower (Arc, 1995), was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, while Party (Leviathan, 2000) was acclaimed by Ruth Padel in the Independent on Sunday. She has been a Poet in Residence at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, and her work appears on a dress by designer Helen Storey, in the animated film Alphabetic (2006), and on a path in Farnham by potter Julian Belmonte. She lives in Brighton.
This title is also available from Amazon as an eBook.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arc Publications
• Release date: Sep 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781908376299

Jackie Wills

Jackie Wills has worked for newspapers, magazines and several universities. A former journalist, she’s been a writer in residence in business, schools, arts and community organisations, including Unilever, London Underground, Shoreham Airport, the Surrey Hills, the London Symphony Orchestra and Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. She has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and run reading groups. Over three decades, Wills has organised live poetry events and mentored many emerging writers, consolidating her experience in The Workshop Handbook for Writers (Arc, 2016). Her poems feature in several anthologies including Writing Motherhood (Seren, 2017) and Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry (Forward Arts Foundation, 2015). Wills writes short stories and creative non-fiction as well as poetry. She has collaborated over many years with visual artist Jane Fordham and Fabrica Gallery in Brighton.

Book preview

AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the editors of the following publications in which some of the poems in this collection have appeared: Agenda, Dark Horse, Molossus World Poetry Series, Poetry Wales, The Echo Room and Warwick Review.

My thanks go to Jane Sybilla Fordham for the title, ‘Woman’s head as jug’ and for her prints, drawings and paintings that live within these poems. Her work has never illustrated mine, my poems have never been about her work, but we have been writing and drawing together since 2006 often using the same sources, so we are true collaborators. Thanks also to David Parfitt for encouraging us.

I am grateful to Moniza Alvi, Martha Kapos, Christina Dunhill, Kate Smith-Bingham, and Susan Wicks – my London lifeline – who’ve read many of these poems, as well as Maria Jastrzębska, Robert Hamberger, Lee Harwood, John McCullough, Janet Sunderland, Bernadette Cremin and Robert Dickinson – the Brighton gang, or as John O’Donoghue calls us, the Beach Generation. For reminding me what it’s all about, as always my thanks go to Brendan Cleary, Catherine Smith, Lorna Thorpe and Michael Hulse.

I am indebted to the Royal Literary Fund for Fellowships at Surrey and Sussex universities.

Finally, I would like to thank my mum Sheila Alcock and my children Mrisi and Giya.

CONTENTS

I

A lone leaping woman

Owner of a mangle

Feather-wife

Saturday girl

Grace-wife

Herring girl

Dorset buttonmaker

Blacksmith

Corset-maker

Fripperer

Boarding house keeper

Ale-wife

II

Forest choir

Words for women

Woman’s head as jug

Cliff

La Fontasse

Calanque

Fireworks on the Feast of the Assumption

The seals’ goodbye

Mackerel shoal

Her year

Translations from the silence of colour

Canopy

Balance

Moults

The change

What she became

Female ancestor

Five aunts

III

SWEATS

Elephants

She wants a baby

It’s unclear how much of a man she needs

A woman without a man

When she finds herself at the top of the stairs

Libido

Clots

Four professors at the menopause symposium

Her beard

Spiders have placed a cataplasm of webs

Smear

Hypothalamus

Superannuation

Her mirror face is spinning

Veins

Her troubles

Her heart

Trace

Atrophy

IV

Return

Imagining my great