ISBN: 978-1-915108-35-7
Published on 18 November 2025
 
Intimate Architecture, Tess Jolly’s second full collection, maps out a geography of previously undiscovered memories, nooks, crannies and shadowlands that turn out to be the real world articulated through a crucible of “delicate unease”: a world of vulnerability, of universal and personal anxiety, of dreams, nightmares and fault lines, but also of “endurance, desire, faith”, and “so much blue our hearts are drenched, euphoric”, a world in which love, however fragile, is the key both to artistry and to building a worthwhile future. Tess Jolly interrogates the distances we create and uphold, but can ultimately bridge.
 
Nightfall

I’m waiting in a car park on the South Downs
to take my daughter home from her sunset picnic.
She’s late, and as dusk morphs into night
 
I try to focus on radio, book, but my mind
keeps slipping, so I follow the lamps
of our bedsides and streets strung far below,
 
the red and white lights of rush-hour traffic
whiplashing the A-road, the sirens flashing
like blue ghost fireflies through the stream,
 
but at the spotlights marking the runway
I think of the Hunter that made this town famous
for the wrong reasons, I think of how often
 
we’d driven down the road where it smashed 
into flame – and how can I turn from the carnage?
I know she needs to be walking out of the woods 
 
with her pocketful of crumbs and her stories,
but what shapes the trees suggest, what ideas form,
and the gate is no longer a gate but a boundary 
 
into the underworld, and I am no longer a mother
collecting her child but a mother returning
again and again to the place where it happened.
 
*
 
“Intimate Architecture houses a Gothic panorama of ghosts, grinning gargoyles and ‘gossiping puppets’ fixated on the body. A mouth is a ‘chamber of parliament debating […] the right amount to eat, the right amount to say’; a throat is ‘a ghoulish workshop’; and the head a ‘chewed skull’ trapped in the shadows where malevolent mice create ‘The Mischief’ of eating rituals. But there’s light and love amid the fear and loneliness, too, just through the side gate. There may still be dark woods, knotted undergrowth and precarious ridges to navigate, but there’s also the ‘confetti of stars’ to guide a family, a seafront where lovers ‘feast on cockles’ and an estuary that ‘glints with wishes’. Here be nightmares but also nightingales ‘who open their beaks wider to sing’ as ‘the forest imagines a different story’ in this intimate collection abundant in courage and heart.”
—Sarah Barnsley, author of The Thoughts (The Poetry Business, 2022)