Jackself
by Jacob Polley
Summary
Jackself tells a childhood, but slant: its hero is Jackself, a boy assembled from the Jacks of English folklore and idiom, Jack Frost, Jack O'Lantern, Jackdaw, Jack of all trades, and his story unfolds in rural Cumbria with his friend and tormentor Jeremy Wren, through school, escapades, terrors, and a grief the book approaches the way children actually meet catastrophe, obliquely and completely. Jacob Polley's wager is that the truest autobiography might be the one written in disguise, and the disguise he chooses is the oldest available, the folk tradition's stock boy, so that a modern Cumbrian childhood comes to the reader dressed in the cadences of nursery rhyme, riddle, charm, and border ballad, forms that were always darker than their reputation. The verse is the collection's engine: short lines with the snap of skipping rhymes, refrains that turn sinister on the second pass, and a soundscape of becks, barns, wet slates, and crow fields rendered with a native's ear, Polley being Carlisle born and Cumbria formed. The judges called it a firework of a book, which catches both the display and the burn; for all its play, Jackself moves toward real darkness, and its final movement earns comparison with the great English poems of childhood without borrowing their manners. It won the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize, Polley's fourth collection after a career of shortlists that began when his debut The Brink was named for the same prize, and it confirmed him as the contemporary master of the eerie English lyric, the tradition of the uncanny local that runs from the ballads through Hughes.
Historical Context & Significance
Polley came up through Cumbria and Lancaster University, held early residencies including at Trinity College, Cambridge, and had already crossed forms, his novel Talk of the Town winning the Somerset Maugham Award in 2010, before Jackself's 2016 win, announced in January 2017; he went on to become professor of creative writing at Newcastle University. The book joined a wider revival of interest in English folk horror and border ballad material running across music and film in those years, and reads now as that whole revival's finest poetry. Its method, memoir conducted through a folk mask drawn from his own Cumbrian childhood, has proved durable for its author too, who has since taken Jackself's poems and characters into sound installations and short films.