Selected Poems

Poetry Book Society Autumn 2026 Special CommendationOver 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.