"Citadel" by Martha Sprackland (Liverpool University Press, 2020)

Poems from LRB, Magma, Poetry, etc. Way beyond me. I like "an orderly struggling to hold my shoulders like the handles of a pneumatic drill" and "the oil rig balanced like a waterboatman on the meniscus" (though the latter continues with "distance ironing the sea's serrations smooth" which doesn't sound new).

I think I get "Other People's Furniture" but I don't think it's much good. I see several allusions to menstruation in "Anti-metre", one idea being that the (irregular?) menstrual cycle syncopates with calendar months. But what are "the hemispheres of my body"? What is "distant rains"? Why the line-breaks? Why not rectangular 3-lines stanzas? Why not stick some extra spaces between words? At the end "another egg drops/ like a spent coffee capsule/ through the body of the machine" which makes sense to me.

The final poem "Transcript" samples from earlier poems.

Other reviews

• Rory Waterman (Many poems in Citadel, Martha Sprackland’s full-length debut, appeared first in two pamphlets. ... a lot of intricate, quizzical self-reckoning akin more to Elizabeth Bishop or (dare I say it) Sylvia Plath than to anyone else writing now. ... Perhaps this will seem too self-absorbed for some tastes, but Sprackland is saved from naivety by her appealingly unostentatious self-awareness.)
• Martyn Crucefix (the poems in Citadel are written by a “composite ‘I’ – part Reformation-era monarch, part twenty-first century poet”. ... While happy to accept the desire of the poet to maintain a distance between the lyric/dramatic ‘I’ and her autobiographical self, I find the idea, the ‘as if’, of this composite authorship hard to take. ... The final poem in Citadel is ‘Transcript’ [...] I wish there were more poems in the book in which this sort of unashamed, ludicrous, heartfelt and imaginatively suggestive communication was portrayed. There are a few other occasions where poems approach it, but the leap of faith required seems even too much for the poet and the results feel more willed than wholly convinced.)
• Mat Riches (Citadel is filled with symbolic objects — the cord, the telephone, eggs, “a flashing blue light [that] make obsessive return[s]”. There are also recurring themes of food, sadness, issues of mental health, travel or the urge to get away)