# Tilt

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/jean-sprackland/tilt/9780224080866

![Tilt](https://quivercdn.com/covers/jonathan-cape/jean-sprackland/tilt_978-02-2408-086-6.jpg?v=2026-04-24%2009%3A41%3A25)

- Book: [Tilt](https://www.bookquiver.com/jean-sprackland/tilt) ([Tilt.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/jean-sprackland/tilt.md))
- Authors: [Jean Sprackland](https://www.bookquiver.com/jean-sprackland)
- Publisher: jonathan_cape
- ISBN: 978-02-2408-086-6
- Pages: 64
- Published: 2007-10-04
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

Jean Sprackland's third collection describes a world in free-fall. Chaos and calamity are at our shoulder, in the shape of fire and flood, ice-storm and hurricane; trains stand still, zoos are abandoned, migrating birds lose their way - all surfaces are unreliable, all territories unmapped. These are poems that explore the ambivalence and dark unease of slippage and collapse, but they also carry a powerful sense of the miraculous made manifest amongst the ordinary: the mating of natterjack toads, ice on the beach ('dream stuff, with its own internal acoustic') or 'the fund of life' in a used contraceptive. Bracken may run wild across the planet 'waiting for the moment/to pounce on the accident/of the discarded match' but there are also the significant wonders of children and the natural beauty of the world they've inherited. Tilt is a collection of raw, distressed and beautiful poems, a hymn to the remarkable survival of things in the face of threat - for every degradation an epiphany, for every drowning a birth.