[cudazi_promotext]On The Havocs (2012)[/cudazi_promotext]
‘Jacob Polley’s third collection shows him widening and deepening his skill for adding new shine to work in the collective word-hoard. ‘The News’ has the unmistakable authority of Auden: ‘The moon’s not sad; the sun won’t worry. / Despite your suffering, England’s still / and only some of us are sorry.’’
[cudazi_promotext]On Talk of the Town (2009)[/cudazi_promotext]
‘A fierce cry of talent, raw as a confession and tender as a poem. Polley’s language is mercurial, his humour quick and surprising. A moving and unmissable debut.’
Chris Cleave, author of The Other Hand
‘A perfectly pitched quest for lost innocence.’
‘Polley unflinchingly patrols the moral borders at which vulnerable young minds might be tipped into violence, as Chris finds himself almost literally on a knife’s edge and must learn what it is to feel pain. Talk of the Town is about youngsters testing emotional, geographical and temporal limits, dramatically involved in events which unfold in the eerie space between days. Polley’s beguiling prose style tests the limits of language, blending lyricism with brutality; juxtaposing tenderness with vicious criminality.’
[cudazi_promotext]On Little Gods (2006)[/cudazi_promotext]
‘Polley’s short narratives grow more nightmarish, and the element of reticence and mystery in the earlier volume deepens in ambiguous love poems.’
Alan Brownjohn in The Times
‘[The Brink’s] short, tough, well-wrought poems, with their satisfying-in-the-mouth vowels, seemed as indebted to song lyrics as to British poetry after Auden…readers interested in the shiftiness and complexity which characterise most human experience will find much to reward them here… Little Gods is a book of darting apperceptions, fragmentary illuminations, often daringly unanchored by any conventional working-through.’
Fiona Sampson in the Liberal
[cudazi_promotext]On The Brink (2003)[/cudazi_promotext]
‘A sparkling collection of crystalline poems, succinct in their observation, precise in their form.’
The Times
‘His writing aspires to the tradition of George Herbert or Henry Vaughan, the kind of poetry that imbues the everyday, the tarnished and burnished, with the possibilities of the transcendent.’
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