Its grief has penetrated its syntax, and when there’s that kind of penetration – it changes the reader’s breathing.
John Berger
Behold handles with exceptional sensitivity the daunting task it sets itself. The language manages to be at once incisive, moving and challenging. Behold is a poem that deserves to be heard and read widely, and 2015 might be a fitting year for that to happen.
Mona Gainer-Salim, SYLPH EDITIONS
Behold is a wonderful work. I have felt the same inadequacy of feeling before so great a horror and you have let the details speak for themselves. Restrained, elegant verse. Thank you.
Bruno Zupan
Fiercely admired for its mysterious, expansive imagery, its bravery, radicalism and strangeness….Nicki Jackowska’s poetry has always aimed at a visionary quality and this book is no exception. The opening piece is a complex, shifting and visceral tribute, impassioned and impressive, to the artist Paula Rego. Her imagery can be disarmingly direct and mysterious: “I remember you on this coast/though you were never here, your coat/the colour of bee-stings” and there are wonderful sequences such as Epiphanies in Hanover Street where the language revels in its inversions and syntactic disruptions looking back to the energy and linguistic daring of 1940’s poets such as George Barker or early W.S.Graham.
Charles Bainbridge, THE GUARDIAN
“Do not ask the perfect sentence of me,” Jackowska warns in the early pages of Behold. This is not a defence of faulty grammar, but an appeal against anything contrived or mechanistic in verse. Her voice is relentlessly fresh… (it has) a subtle, organic rhythmic akin to breathing.
Ted Hughes described her previous works as “breathing in their own tides.” The tidal metaphor is still apt. Behold is rife with botanical references, and the natural world provides us with some of its most moving imagery. For example, in Leaving the Birds a tiny event offers powerful intimations of mortality: “Where a twig breaks/evening grows upon/each stalk, masters it”.
The title poem of the collection deals with the legacy of the Holocaust. Set in Krakow, 2005, Behold threads together past, present, history and autiobiography into a harrowing exploration of guilt. The speaker betrays herself for crying “only once/in the place/where rivers would not be enough”, and for her cowardice in having done “the acceptable/thing and gained the museum in/a crumbling step or two, then fled from its hush”.
The poem avoids heavy-handedness by concerning itself with specificities. Jackowska describes “shoes … with laces missing/and different sizes/according to where they fell”, and “glass tanks/of tangled hair (that) held also/perfect plaits, a whole head taken”. Such piercing details snag the reader’s flesh, tugging at our nerve-endings.
Jackowska is incapable of simple polemic. Mystery is an indispensable part of her work. It covers everything she touches with a shimmering veil of uncertainty. Often you feel the writing reaching for emotions that are beyond description: “a wriggling line of ink trying for shape/on an obstinate pasge”. Though we might not decipher every inch of Jackowska’s meaning, we can at least marvel at the singular beauty of her voice.
Gordan Weetman, THE LITERATEUR MAGAZINE