Nicki Jackowska
Nicki Jackowska has published six collections of poetry, three novels and the ground-breaking book on language, Write for Life. She continues to work as a creative writing tutor and advisor and is a consummate performer of her work, drawing upon early theatrical roots. Theatre increasingly permeates her work, as in this collection, but she is also working on a one-person piece for theatre. This embodies many themes of this collection and her recently completed novel, The Lost Gardens of Mariamne.
She received a Lannan Grant and an Arts Council England completion grant for this work, which are included among many further awards. She continues to work in collaboration with visual artists, as tutor and in performance – most recently with the work of Paula Rego and for Paintings Unwrapped, an exhibition curated by the late Professor Norbert Lynton. She lives and works in Brighton.
Behold
Behold is Nicki Jackowska’s seventh book of poetry. The last decade has seen a marked change in position, language and sensibility. She is more daring in her juxtapositions, the creation of dimensions whereby one world seeps through another. The title poem is the crown of this book’s achievement, where history (the Holocaust) is woven among precise particulars, the mundane detail. Together with her working-class English roots, this European consciousness creates an extraordinary spectrum of awareness and evocation. Many of the poems are akin to dramatic monologues, moving from a Lewes garden party to characters in a Brighton terrace and thence to...