Martha Sprackland

I had the pleasure of meeting Martha at The Golden Fleece in Stroud. Martha had explained that she is often influenced by over heard conversations in the pub garden.

Martha Sprackland is an editor, writer and translator. Her debut collection of poems, Citadel (Pavilion, 2020), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Costa Poetry Award. Martha teaches for Arvon, where she is also a trustee, and has previously taught for the Poetry School.

Martha’s translations from Spanish include poems by Ana Gorría (Ciclo, Debacle Ediciones, 2020), Gladys Mendía (PTC/Ledbury, 2020), Verónica Viola Fisher (Arc/Edge Hill, 2021). In 2021 she was shortlisted for the Peirene–Stevns Translation Prize for fiction.

Her new translation of the poems and selected prose of sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross is forthcoming from Penguin Classics in 2026.

For more information about Martha's work, visit http://marthasprackland.co.uk

Martha has kindly shared one of her poems. Its called a Blow to the Head and it was first published in Citadel (Pavilion 2020).

A Blow to the Head

BY MARTHA SPRACKLAND

enough to knock the earth from its orbit—

O I was cracked open

god streaming like daylight into the chamber

the nausea of my elliptical swerve

toward consciousness and away again

—I retreated into the citadel—

walked quiet pathways during the bombardment

(which was habit-forming, I was fortified)

knew that beyond the wall something

was spilling, blood or yolk onto tile—I made

my way to the innermost room.

My hand was the key—found her strung

like a diver—eyes shut, calm and before

the old world dragged me back I loosed

the cord from her wrists—woke

back into a different time with the end

of it in my hand