Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. This week I want to look at a collection

of poetry from 2018. It's called Green Noise and it's by the English poet Jean Sprackland

actually from Burton on Trent or its environs I believe and a name that you see on so many

poetry prize short lists etc. So I'll be honest I've only recently discovered Jean Sprackland

to my shame but also to my delight because it's great when you find a new poet and you think

oh I love this. Green Noise I'm always a bit low to say what the theme of a collection of poetry is

but I would say certainly one of the major themes of Green Noise is the juxtaposition of the modern

world with nature, history and that deep sense of place that folklore and tradition can produce.

The first poem in the collection is called April and the first thing I notice about the poem April

by Jean Sprackland is that it is light if not utterly devoid of punctuation and I think there's

an explanation for that which will become hopefully apparent. I'm going to give you the first

stanza so this is April spring is springing. Machine of spring with all your levers thrown to max

clouds in ripped clothes and sheep trailing afterbirth where last week's buds sucked blue juice from

the dusk, now the branches swollen, priopic, cherry bling and hawthorn, sexbed smell,

motorway hedgeros on thrust, electric rape fields. Some of you might have that contemporary

poetry response or you think oh no it's not rhyming and I can't find any proper rhythm just bear

with me. I think there is tremendous beauty and truth in the poetry of Jean Sprackland and

it's going to be okay if you'll just hold my hand. So it begins machine of spring with all your

levers thrown to max and in the collection which as I say the theme of the clash between technology

and the modern world versus green pastoral countryness that opening phrase machine of spring gets us

going right away so the speaker is responding to nature's awakening as if it was a machine maybe

that's how we've been socialised in the 21st century everything is seen through the technological

...