Making the Wedding Dress

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”.

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