Literature / Writing

Elemental: Manchester Poetry Library Summer Exhibition, Curated by Jean Sprackland

Manchester Metropolitan University, Grosvenor East, Cavendish Street

Until 31 Oct

Exhibition

About this event

This new exhibition by Jean Sprackland takes her most forthcoming poetry collection, Goyle, Chert, Mire, as its point of departure. Described by the publisher as ‘a book-length sequence of poems about place, time, illness and recovery,’ the collection unfolds across three sections, each shaped by a distinctive element of the Blackdown Hills – and in particular the remote spring line valley where the poet lives. The exhibition traces the project’s initial attention to the physical elements of the landscape – rock, water, wind, mud, hill, ditch. From this grounding in matter, the focus turns to the act of naming itself: to dialect words, geographical terms, and place names, and to the ways language itself both holds and shapes a terrain. Words, once spoken or written, become elemental, forming part of the material from which poems are made.