Citadel

Martha Sprackland Press Reviews

'The most arresting book that I've read this year is Martha

Sprackland's 51 pages of poetry, Citadel (Liverpool University Press). I've

returned over and again to this little work of perfect art: the language is so

lithe, exact and rich; the painterly images such a joy; the sensibility so fine

and rare. Citadel has a careful, agile, flowing structure: many poems in the

voice of a sixteenth-century Spanish queen, and others in Sprackland's own. Her

luxuriant conjuring eloquence about objects, places and emotion reminds me of

Elizabeth Bishop's.'

Richard Davenport-Hines, 'Books of the Year' in The TLS 'Sprackland's poetic process depends on the conversations held with an extreme figure from history, whose own voice has been long hidden, but without ever succumbing to biography or retelling. The end result is pleasingly strange; a collection which defies the limits of physics to find a timeslip between centuries old inner-city Spain and the north-west coastal towns of 21st century England.'

Hannah Whaley, Dundee Review of the Arts 'Martha Sprackland has filled the pages with sharp, delicious and multi-layered verse. To meld the symbolic with the historic into an interior dreamscape of pain and glory is no easy task. Citadel is elaborate, robust, pleasurable, and built to last.'

David Morgan O'Connor, RHINO Poetry 'Citadel - despite its surface of smooth, confident lyricism - is a very strange book... Even the strangest descriptions have a rightness about them:

The bright/ metallic snip like a speckled thrush tapping/ a snail against a stone

is how Sprackland hears the sound of a man clipping his fingernails. How could anyone resist that?'

Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph 'So much fire comes to life in snapshots on these pages ... The images are electrifying. Something marvellous occurs: a domestic scene becomes

a blow to the head / enough to knock the earth from its orbit.

I love this book.'

Ilya Kaminsky

'Martha Sprackland's poems are virtuosic in their timing, texture, and detailed evocation. From poems of the hospital to poems of the shore, this is a fierce and fresh debut that rings with courage and intelligence. Citadel will seize you by the heart and lead you into deep and resonant territories, and when you return you will find yourself changed, strange to yourself, and wondrously enriched.'Fiona Benson

'[Citadel] is keenly responsive to questions of place and displacement... Sprackland's painterly visions linger long in the memory.'

Aingeal Clare, The Guardian

For previous work: 'Sprackland's words pierce through the mundanity of the everyday, creating intense emotional landscapes [...] With Milk Tooth, Sprackland continues to establish herself as one of Britain's finest young poets.'

Robert Greer, The London Magazine

For previous work: 'Sprackland refreshes the domestic and mundane in poems which are outwardly calm, but lit from within to reveal unusual visionary angles.'

Eric Gregory Award Judges 2014

For previous work: 'Martha Sprackland is already a formidable technician. The sonnet is moved through quatrains and and a kind of terza rima, and there is deft and adept free verse. The result is a calm, taut surface to the poems which belies the heightened, sometimes gothic nature of the subject matter.'

Ian Pople, The Manchester Review

For previous work: '[A] commanding teller of the strange stories of others . . . Sprackland's best poems have the power of an irresistible tide.'

Alison Brackenbury, PN Review

For previous work: '[V]iolence or (in this case)

terrible dynamism

is figured with a tender precision . . . Sprackland forces a wonderful fascination upon her readers.'

Edwina Attlee, The Poetry Review