Spiritlands

By Sarah Wardle

Spiritlands invites you into a territory that is at once individual and plural. On the one hand, this is poetry about a personal geography, an eclectic landscape, space in which to be oneself; on the other, these are poems all about hope, life and nature, about belonging to the whole world and asserting one’s right to a place and voice in it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Feb 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781780374352

Sarah Wardle

Sarah Wardle was born in London in 1969. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College; Oxford, where she read Classics; and Sussex, where she read English. She won Poetry Review’s new poet of the year award in 1999 and her first collection, Fields Away (Bloodaxe Books, 2003), was shortlisted for the Forward best first collection prize. Her second book, SCORE! (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), included some of the poems she broadcast while poet-in-residence for Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, as well as the script of a film-poem, ‘X: A Poetry Political Broadcast’. A Knowable World (Bloodaxe Books, 2009) followed her detainment in a Central London psychiatric hospita. Her most recent Bloodaxe collections are Beyond (2014) and Spiritlands (2019). She has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, and works as a creative writing tutor for Morley College, Westminster Kingsway College and the Workers’ Educational Association.

Book preview

SARAH WARDLE

SPIRITLANDS

Spiritlands invites you into a territory that is at once individual and plural. On the one hand, this is poetry about a personal geography, an eclectic landscape, space in which to be oneself; on the other, these are poems all about hope, life and nature, about belonging to the whole world and asserting one’s right to a place and voice in it.

‘Spiritlands gives us a vivid account of the poet’s grandfather’s injuries in the First World War. Despite shrapnel in his left side he manages to get up and walk to safety. The poem now cuts to London during the Blitz where a small girl – the poet’s mother – slips away from parents and walks off into a bombed city.

Wondrously, these two figures find each other in the poet’s imagination. The soldier picks up the small girl and dances, dances, dances. There is solace here but these transgenerational memories remind us of the dangers we are now facing in our own fractious, nationalistic, ecologically challenged century. Sometimes Sarah Wardle sings quietly, putting herself gracefully at the centre of her poems. Sometimes her songs soar above the roofs of

London reaching out with an open heart for that broken, breaking larger world. Spiritlands is a glorious, generous, impressively humane work.’ – Julian Stannard

‘Sarah Wardle writes with great humanity…of the indignity, frustrations and fear of acute episodes of mental illness. That’s how she manages to get her readers to empathise with all those in the community, both in and out of hospital, who live with the stigma of madness’ – Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger

Cover painting: Caer Caradoc, Shropshire by Jordan Mansfield

SARAH WARDLE

Spiritlands

To Aidan Williams with gratitude and affection

Suddenly snow comes and enters our lives like love, shining with wonder.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared: DulwichOnView, The Holocaust in History and Memory, Morley Magazine, The Spectator and South Bank Poetry.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Song for World

The Golden Bough

Votive

Spiritlands

Amina’s Truth

Night Nurses

First-hand Evidence

In the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

The Spirit to Solve

Human Spirit

Pamphleteering

At Dove Cottage

Schoolgirl to Teacher

Mr Wales

Careless Whisper

Art Therapy

On Empty Street

City Rain

Mill-hands Conversing, 1919

Still Life

Umbrella

US

Modern Classics