House with the Mansard Roof

“You are a girl in a lonely city, pushing up a sash window at the end of another day.”

In her enthralling third collection, Frances Sackett examines the hidden histories emerging from the land. We meet the Yde Girl, found abandoned in a peat bog in the Netherlands; a ghostly ship and its hidden treasures excavated near Sutton Hoo; and a sunken forest discovered off the Welsh coast. There are poems with fierce empathy for women living in war-torn countries, some in exile, some in isolation, and a sequence for a mother separated from her daughter.

Humour, and especially her wry wit – found in the most unlikely places – provides a playful contrast to her more serious, elegiac moments. Sackett's poetry highlights her love of the landscape, the night sky, sleepy country stations, and her fellow poets.

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“In the title poem of this beautifully nuanced collection, Frances Sackett writes, ‘If you entered any door, you would find yourself and a dream of yourself mingle with the interior dust.’ What she does so effortlessly is to negotiate between these three worlds: the human, the dream, and the dust, with an unerring insight into the frailty and resilience of the human spirit.”
– Ian Pople

“[Sackett’s poems] combine sensuous, physical immediacy with spareness, restraint and considerable technical skill.”
– Edmund Prestwich

“Achingly lovely, these poems know what it is to be human.”
– Gail Ashton

“Sackett’s writing is distinguished by a luminous quality that is both subtle and compelling. The House with the Mansard Roof is a collection to own and to keep returning to for its exquisite artistry and emotional depths.”
– David Mark Williams, The Lake