Making the Wedding Dress

Synopsis

Wills gives readers the exceptional at the heart of daily life, invites us to suspend disbelief, enable the surreal.

She begins Making the Wedding Dress with a quote from a handbook on sewing and asks what can be fixed, what does it mean to make a daughter’s wedding dress. The collection fans out to explore bullying, money, trade, rats and sinkholes. A third section questions how humans relate to other species, speculates on a worm's opinion of people, the communal life of starlings. The book ends on ideas of exits and entrances, home, absences within a family and the fragility of care.

Making the Wedding Dress makes many unexpected connections, moving from sauna to plum tree, to a luxury yacht cruising off Brighton beach. It asks what crows think of humans, it urges its readers to question what is normal.

Jackie Wills’ six previous collections have taken on big issues but her poems are always grounded. Her poems have been described as warm and witty, satirical, feminist and unputdownable. She starts with the mundane, then exaggerates – a list of the many words used to describe a woman, a sequence of short, impressionist poems on the surreality of menopause.

Liz Lochhead described her 1995 debut, Powder Tower (Arc 1995), as “full of fabulous and exact fictions about ordinary family life”. Writer Robert Macfarlane described her second book Party (Leviathan 2000) as “a very fine collection indeed”.

Praise for This Book

‘Making the Wedding Dress is a collection that holds ‘in tension’ Jackie Wills’s many interests and concerns. From the disturbing intimacy of needlework to the discoveries of aging and the consolations and concerns of the natural world, here are poems that say what needs to be said. Terrifically readable, full of thought and reflection, this is a book born of clear-eyed observation and beautifully shaped language.’ —Jonathan Davidson

‘The poems in Making the Wedding Dress are sewn with a lyrical needle connecting family and community to womanhood and ageing to nature and sinkholes to commitments, personal and political. Their compelling voice enacts a restless energy, in form and authoritative approach. Jackie Wills’s keen eye notices ‘the purest yellow opening in the sun like full skirts.’ One poem ends ‘look, look, look, look!’ and Wills obeys her own music in this rich, fierce, searching collection.’ —Robert Hamberger

‘In Making the Wedding Dress, Jackie Wills shows us what it means to care for others, the planet and ourselves. There is a beautiful capability in Wills’ poems to take us deep inside a richness of worlds – familial, natural, corporeal – where we can meditate the tenuousness and meaning that is found within them.’ —Rebecca Goss

‘There is such implicit skill in this collection that the reader could begin to believe it is effortless – that all poets can do this, that of course this is how it’s meant to be. We start to feel entitled – all poetry must be this right, this fitting, this real. It’s not.’ —Sonya Smith

Praise for Previous Work

‘(On Party Her poems are brief, allusive, inconsequential and often very strange tales which juxtapose vivid details of childhood, unanswered questions and red herrings, dream images and natural details which spark memories of anecdotes.’ —Andrew Stibbs, The North

‘Gagarin’s Moon … is a magnificent group of poems set mostly in South Africa. They demonstrate an exactness of both looking and feeling (e.g. Wills likening of the visa stamps in her passport to “pressed flowers/ in an inherited book”) and suggest a scrupulous intelligence which, while it wants to situate itself within a strange culture, wants also to understand that culture on its own terms. The third section, Flight Paths, is devoted to the countryside of southern England and concludes what becomes over its length a very fine collection indeed.’ —Robert Macfarlane, Leviathan Quarterly

‘On Woman’s Head as Jug) I would trust the power of her account of the menopause, “When the blowtorch is on inside her”, not least for the wry suggestion that her subject could “supply the city’s tumble dryers”. Wills is unflinchingly witty about age “the M1, with twisting A roads, / has appeared on her shins”.’ —Alison Brackenbury, Under the Radar

‘On Woman’s Head as Jug) Brilliant and unputdownable. Wills imbues the minutiae of life with magic and other-worldliness. Her topics are wide ranging but rooted in the everyday.’ —Julia Webb

‘(On A Friable Earth) The legendary British poet Jackie Wills relays ageing womanhood in beautiful style, smashing its taboo in western society along the way.’ —Jack Mckeever

‘(On A Friable Earth) Jackie Wills’ wonderful new collection A Friable Earth offers an unflinching look at ageing. It exposes and explores the vulnerable underbelly of grief and fear and loss. There are sudden endings, exits and departures and the sadnesses these things leave behind them. A Friable Earth is many other things too, including funny and sometimes angry. It’s also bursting with the life and energy of the natural world – and us within it … It is an honest, life-affirming and loving collection of skilfully turned poems.”’ —Michaela Ridgway, PigHog poetry