Selected Poems - by Jacob Polley (Paperback)

About the Book

An expansive retrospective from a T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet.

Book Synopsis

Poetry Book Society Autumn 2026 Special Commendation

Over the two decades since his award-winning debut, The Brink, Jacob Polley has earned a reputation as one of the major poetic talents to come out of the north of England. Rooted in the folkloric inheritance of Reiver country - in its rhymes and spells, its work and weather - his poems conduct the electricity of the English lyric tradition into modern vessels and remastered forms.

Metamorphosis is central to his perception: with the lightest touch, sunlight becomes honey, children become owls, and loss is alchemised into objects and animals, love songs and cradle songs. The wild lyric energy of his T.S. Eliot Prize-winning Jackself reminds us that childhood has remained the omphalos for Polley, his work a place where the wonders and terrors of a rural upbringing are repeatedly explored and elegised.

Transformation becomes translation in his more recent poems, where voices grapple with meaning itself in riddles without answers, or with various answers, and elemental tumult is harnessed into speech. "I've tried to enact a kind of intense alertness in my poems," he writes, "to what it's like to be alive and conscious and a person that the world pours into through the ears, eyes and heart".

An ideal entry point for new readers, Selected Poems affirms Jacob Polley's standing as one of the most gifted poets of his generation.

Review Quotes

"The poems have an unforced charm, delighting in the wonder that surrounds us" --Guardian

"Polley's grasp . . . is masterful . . . and a delight. He succeeds in echoing the texture of his poetic forebears, but with a wry panache which is all his own." --Stephanie Sy-Quia, The Poetry Review

"What sustains these playful, wise, gentle lyrics is Polley's technical skill. Longer poems are activated and maintained by their musicality and by a particular way with syntax that seeks to give texture and topography to the poems. One feels them as one is delighted by them" --Stephen Sexton, The Irish Times

About the Author

Jacob Polley was born in Carlisle, Cumbria. He is the author of five acclaimed books of poems, The Brink, Little Gods, The Havocs, Jackself, and Material Properties, all published by Picador. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, and both The Brink and The Havocs were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His collection Jackself won the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2011, he was Arts Queensland's poet-in-residence, and he was Visiting Fellow Commoner in the Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, 2005-7. He has also held residencies at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and at the Wordsworth Trust. In 2004, he was named one of the 'Next Generation' of the twenty best new poets in Britain. His first novel, Talk of the Town, a fiercely demotic and funny coming-of-age murder mystery, won the 2010 Somerset Maugham Award. He teaches at the University of Newcastle where lives.