ISBN: 978-1-915108-42-5
Published 1 May 2026
62 pages
"Andy Jackson’s sixth full collection begins with an electrifying, playlist-inspired sonnet crown, and goes on to feature a luminous cast of musicians, singers, sportspeople, and entertainers – some famous, others almost forgotten. Behind it all, the poems reflect on dream and reality, the uncertain present and its possible future, living bodies and dead spirits, what is and what might have been. Even a poem itself could turn out to be only 'the simulacrum of the one I should have written'."
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Two Film Poems (YouTube links):
Some Kind of a Man
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Elegy For a Haunted Man
‘Hauntology is founded on a belief that even that which does not exist physically or currently can still leave impressions on the present’. —Paige Allen ‘What Is Hauntology?’, 2023
I used to know my pockets so well – wrappers
for sucked sweets, blown tresses of paper hankies –
but today I pulled out keys for a car long-sold,
a blister pack of pills in duck-egg blue, one cold
coin withdrawn from circulation in the eighties.
I wonder whose these are, and why it matters.
The old radio retuned itself this afternoon, fading
out a singalong, piping in a chorus flecked with age,
a song I’d never heard yet found myself humming.
I sat down to a late meal. It tasted of something
sharp which I’m sure I didn’t add – tarragon, sage?
I pray my tongue is more than what it’s tasting.
I’ve been advised to keep a diary. It’s in a drawer
that trembles with the smell of lipstick, the myth
of faces I used to read. I mark this page with a hair.
Tonight, my footsteps sounded strange on the stair.
The clocks go back again; the third time this month,
but I’ve forgotten what it is I’m saving daylight for.
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“Pyrotechnics of wit and formal invention laced with shots of melancholia disguised as jokes but funny all the same, gathering together former disco hits disguised as sonnets, and highlights of sports and music hall bathed in fatalism all delivered with clownish virtuosic grace.” —George Szirtes
“With brisk elegance, Andy Jackson’s poems deploy a metaphysical wit to dramatize the great themes of time, decay and the urge to preserve. His explorations of popular culture (Donna Summer and Kraftwerk), or its precursor the music-hall (the comic titan Jimmy James) draw on a connoisseur’s rich resources, while his interest in stage illusion recalls Michael Donaghy. There are some very funny yet inescapably melancholy poems here. And the cleanliness of Jackson’s sentence construction is a refreshment in itself.” —Sean O’Brien
