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Rosie Jackson’s poetry collections include: Love Leans over the Table (Two Rivers Press, 2023); Light Makes it Easy (Indigo Dreams, 2022); Aloneness is a Many-headed Bird (with Dawn Gorman, Hedgehog Press, 2020); Two Girls and a Beehive: Poems about Stanley Spencer and Hilda Carline (with Graham Burchell, Two Rivers Press, 2020) – Annie Freud called Two Girls and a Beehive ‘a masterpiece of ekphrasis’; The Light Box (Cultured Llama, 2016); What the Ground Holds (Poetry Salzburg, 2014).
She has degrees from Warwick and York, and has taught at the Universities of East Anglia, West of England, and Nottingham Trent. Her books of prose include Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (Methuen, 1981); Frieda Lawrence (1994); Mothers Who Leave (1994); and a memoir, The Glass Mother (2016).
Now living in Devon, Rosie is on the team of Poetry Teignmouth and works as a creative writing tutor. She was a Hawthornden fellow in 2017, and nominated for the Pushcart prize in 2021. Awards include: Commended Hippocrates 2024; Commended National Poetry Competition 2022; 3rd Prize Kent and Sussex 2022; Commended Winchester 2022; Shortlisted Bridport 2022; 1st prize Teignmouth 2021; 3rd Prize Acumen 2021; 1st prize Hedgehog Press 2020; 1st prize Poetry Space 2019; 1st prize Wells 2018; Highly commended Winchester 2018; 1st prize Stanley Spencer Competition 2017.
‘rare, nourishing poems, open and vulnerable, spiritually aware and with an acute sense of beauty and struggle.’ Moniza Alvi
‘startling, moving poems that explore the porous, shifting boundary between the historical and the contemporary.’ Kim Moore
Finally, in addition to the poems presented here, Rosie’s poem ‘The Boisterous Sobbings of Margery Kempe’ , which was commended in the 2022 National Poetry Competition, can be found as text and audio recording on the Poetry Society website by following the link..
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Rosie introduces her work
Looking back at my poems to date, I realise much of their focus has been an inner journey reflected through figures other than myself: initially mythical and historical – Eurydice, Demeter, Mary Shelley – then increasingly artistic – Barbara Hepworth, Stanley Spencer, Hilda Carline – and recently more mystic, so though I have occasionally shared my own story directly, it has been mostly refracted and displaced.
My latest collection Love Leans over the Table includes poems about mystics from different traditions of East and West, including Sufi poet Rabia of Basra, metaphysical John Donne, Quaker George Fox, and Christian recluses such as Julian of Norwich, Marjorie Kempe and Simone Weil, their quest wider than my own personal one, yet also a metaphorical expression of it. And given this growing preoccupation with mortality, immortality, and a search for spiritual meaning, not always on trend in our current cultural climate (I’ve been told I use the word ‘light’ rather too often!), I’ve been surprised and gratified by the warm reception to my poems in journals and competitions.
I feel fortunate, in a way, to have come to poetry writing relatively late in my life, after many years teaching literature, for there is such a burgeoning of fantastic contemporary voices to relish. Amongst my favourites and influences are Marie Howe, Sharon Olds, Jack Gilbert, Wendell Berry, Louise Gluck, Carolyn Forche, Annemarie Ni Churreain, Anne Ryland, Kim Moore and the wonderful recently lost Kathryn Bevis.
Like Derek Walcott, who called poetry a ‘form of prayer’, I’m drawn to work that tries to capture the ineffable, that lies beyond language, which is the province of silence. But words are also my first love, and for all their having one foot in another world, I want my poems to be no less verbally rich, grounded, earthy, celebratory, affirming, questioning, subtle, brave, intelligent and wry.
The six poems selected here give some sense of the range of my work.
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Rosie Jackson: Six Poems
BARBARA HEPWORTH CONSIDERS THE VISITORS AT TREWYN
They love to ask about the fire:
those scorch marks on my living room floor.
Or they sit in the garden hoping
an angel might appear
looking like me – red gingham scarf,
a chisel behind each ear.
The holes are where we meet –
for them, a weightless place of possibilities,
for me, the hollow of what’s missed –
the inside edge of stone, unpolished bronze,
sounds like the mirage of sea inside
a shell – an ocean of far-off moments.
And I want to tell them it’s as true now:
there is no fixed point
of light – everything still asks
to be touched, walked through.
(From The Light Box , reprinted in Love Leans over the Table.)
IN WHICH HILDA BRINGS HER COMPLAINTS TO GOD
(based on Hilda Carline 1889-1950, here remembering her life and marriage to Stanley Spencer)
1
I am the artist with the broken brush
in her hand.
I am the one who sketches
dead violets.
I am the mother whose pram
fell down the steps.
I am the corpse
Stanley carries on his back.
I hang round his neck
light as a feather.
Why did you have him lie in the tents of the ungodly?
2
I have joined the caravan of women
in white, on the wrong side of the road,
the wrong side of the sky.
I don’t sleep. Every night the same.
I count sheep, hundreds of sheep, running
to the slaughter.
I consider the lilies of the field.
I consider the mother I wanted to be.
3
Where are the rooms that built love round us?
Where are the horseshoes, the four-leafed clover?
Where is the summer sun streaming through muslin curtains?
Where is the milk and honey?
Where are my feet? Where is my breast?
Where is my basket of ripe babies?
4
I used to think he would love me
out of my solitude,
as you do.
But now I see he loves me only
in the before and after,
loves me as I was, rummaging in a chest
of drawers, climbing into bed,
loves me as I will be,
naked on the moor.
He dreams of welcoming me home –
splashes poppies on my dress,
tears open their bodies.
He likes to have his arms around the dead.
5
First he wanted marriage, then divorce,
then marriage again.
I wish I could be like him,
selfish, painting.
But I was the woman caught in adultery.
Adultery – with my own husband
after he’d married another woman’s lover!
I cursed him, loathed him,
and the curse rebounded on me
as curses do.
Where was the angel to stand behind me
with his fiery brand?
6
Oh, my daughters.
My lovely daughters, given away
to my brother’s wife’s mother,
Minniehaha.
Where is their hair to braid, their hands to hold?
Where is the clothes horse, with their damp socks and knickers?
Where the piano and prayers?
Where were you, who said you loved children?
7
He will turn me into a goddess
after I’m gone. He will plump me up
with sheen on my stockings.
He will worship at the altar
of his new beatitudes.
It is so much easier to love a woman
when she’s covered in ivy.
8
The public will forgive him.
The queen will reward him.
Arise, Sir Stanley.
A man who drove his wife to hide
like silverfish behind the wallpaper.
9
His shame in me makes me ashamed
to meet myself. I am heavy with failure.
How will I rise to the heavens?
Even your terrible brightness tortures me.
In this, as in many things,
my husband was wrong.
Resurrection is the worst prophecy.
10
I lie down where the bluebells are thickest.
My body curls away into illness.
I am the shape of a coiled fern,
the head of a violin.
11
What do I pack for the journey?
My wedding ring?
The finger where attachment
squeezed too tight?
12
I used to think that when I climbed the stile
from the churchyard towards the river,
your smile would spread like a blessing
across my face. I would see new worlds.
But now I am in your many arms,
I remember only the swans I painted
that year my brother, Sydney, died,
the sweet Thames as it flowed under
Cookham Bridge –
gave back wings, trees,
clouds, a line of empty punts,
a small boat waiting to sail.
(From Two Girls and a Beehive: Poems about the Art and Lives of Stanley Spencer and Hilda Carline, written with the late Graham Burchell)
JOHN DONNE ARRIVING IN HEAVEN
He knew it would be a melting, looking back
at the world as a place of icicles and clouds,
lilies of passion unmooring their tangled roots.
Knew that with the rungs of prayer and reason
knocked away, the subtle knot undone,
he would step into this delicate permanence,
the light cleansing, as protracted evening sun
perfects a field of harvest corn.
Expected such radiance that finds no flaws
in all that’s happened, no severity,
only the mercy of a paradise always autumn,
its joy possessed, ripe, perfect, complete.
But this is less the arrival he foresaw
than an undoing of distances, a shedding
of himself to become who he already was,
not gaining union but losing the illusion
he was separate, was ever other than this one:
the hand that set all things in motion,
spread this equal light, made on a whim
the stars, the schoolboys, the unruly sun.
All love a dream of this. And now, as he takes on
the bliss, the infinite bliss his little deaths
on earth struggled to reach, he finds his words
at last translated to their proper tongue.
(From Love Leans over the Table)
AN ANCHORITE LAMENTS THE DESTRUCTION OF HER CELL IN HENRY VIII’S DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES, 1537
I laid down my life, so He could make wine out of me,
jug after jug. I wanted to be trodden by His feet.
But the Lord God has taken a battering ram to the heavens.
He has broken the night into pieces & days are too bright,
stars too sharp, prayers too feeble to be heard over such
great distances. Is this what it is to be scorched by the fires
of Love? Has devotion become so alien in this world,
it must be dismantled, stone by stone? I pick over the ruins
as if there’s been an earthquake – a solitary, a woman who rattles
like a tinker with her pans, yet nothing to sell or mend. Oh, return me
to the discipline of the squint, the blind comfort of darkness.
Give me back the cover of His wings, my white apron of chastity.
I wasn’t meant to be resurrected. My vow was unto death. This is how
Lazarus must have felt – nervous of each open space, raped by sunlight.
(From Love Leans over the Table)
THE DAY MEHER BABA DIED
I’m 17. My bedroom in our council house
has two divans draped with black and white throws.
So much is black and white. There’s life and
there’s death. There’s others and there’s me.
I’m hungry. I skip breakfast. I’ve lost so much
weight I’ve been struck off the hockey team.
At 7.45am I take the number 7 bus. I sit
on school radiators to keep warm, read
Francois Mauriac’s Le Noeud de Vipères
for A-level. The skies have not gone dark,
though floods in Mecca have made the Kaaba
unreachable. I have no idea what the word
‘Kaaba’ means. I have never heard of Allah.
I’m a year away from messing up my life.
In 3 years my father will die. In 43 years my mother
will die. In 10 years I will know this date better
than my own birthday. I will be in love with a man
who today is surrounded by ice and flowers.
Across India phones are ringing. People are rushing
for trains and flights. Trucks of ice are driving
up the hill that will one day be my sanctuary.
I skip lunch. Hour by hour I grow lighter.
I am more dead than alive. In the fierce
Maharashtran sunset, crowds gather. He
is more alive than dead. A portable gramophone
plays ‘Begin the Beguine’ – To live it again
is past all endeavour… On the bus home, I memorise
quotes from Mauriac. I wear a navy beret.
It’s February tomorrow. I’m waiting to hear
which university has offered me a place. I’m
predicted 3 As. I’m as ignorant as Formica.
It’s 1969. I have a decade of emptiness ahead
of me. 10 more years of not knowing anything.
Then a lifetime letting in what’s happened today.
Note: Meher Baba, born Pune, India, 1894, died Meherazad, 25 February 1969, 12.15pm. A copy of Leslie Hutchinson singing Cole Porter’s ‘Begin the Beguine’ was played at the interment, and his tomb shrine at Meherabad, Maharashtra, has become a site of world pilgrimage.
(From Love Leans over the Table)
WHEN MY BODY IS PULLED FROM ME
there’ll be no time to apologise
to my lover as angels push him to one side,
no chance to say farewell to my breasts,
tenderness, toe nails, all of which have served me
for decades without complaint. I’ll just be
swimming in the pool of the day, unshriven,
unshaven, when I’m yanked out by the roots,
my mind asking what the fuck is happening?
my soul lifted into the astonishment of a blue
and yellow moment, sifted into the shape
of something weaker yet stronger than
I’ve ever known – breeze, wind, monsoon,
mistral, boreas, sirocco, white squall, zephyr –
every kind of hurricane and whisper.
(From Love Leans over the Table)
The High Window 