Coracle, my first full-length poetry collection. 94 of my readers’ and audiences’ favourite poems in a sequence that is in itself a poem. Read from front to back it will surely mess with your mind.
from Celtic Knots
(St Audoen’s Church, Dublin, 2005)
Temple of history, temple
of short lives long
gone, temple of hundreds
of souls… trod
on me hard as I trod
on its layers
of graves. Quiet
spirits whispered hundreds
of hushes
from the eleventh-
century walls.
If I ever go to church in Dublin this is where.
Not in St Patrick’s with its souvenir stalls.
If I go back to Dublin,
if I take you there,
let me take you to St Audoen’s…
View or download the e-book From the opening lines of the first poem, the reader is introduced to a powerful, resonant and poignantly moving voice … Jackson’s poetry is lean and purposeful … There are many stunning poems here, wry and wistful, love poems with a heartbreaking absence of sentimentality, terrific poems of place and observation and understanding … Coracle is unreservedly recommended. — Shane McCauley in Indigo
If words were chemicals, the potency packed into Coracle would need a stronger container than paper and ink, page and stanza. Jackson’s voice is immediate, the sensations intense, the experiences intelligently informed by free association, by her sense of the absurd and a poignant sensibility. … [Jackson’s] expression is as contemporary, individual and vivid as a digital video and, like an online broadcast, it seeks to straddle the divide between personal and public worldviews. This collection should carry a warning: Your perception will be altered. — Annamaria Weldon