My Writing

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Reviews

‘Lines inked on a page’: a conversation with Charlotte Gann about Intimate Architecture in The Understory Conversation

In the Guardian

In Right Word Editing

In The Friday Poem

In London Grip

Intimate Architecture, Tess Jolly’s second full collection, maps out a geography of previously undiscovered memories, nooks, crannies and shadowlands that turn out to be the real world articulated through a crucible of ‘delicate unease’: a world of vulnerability, of universal and personal anxiety, of dreams, nightmares and fault lines, but also of ‘endurance, desire, faith’, and ‘so much blue our hearts are drenched, euphoric’, a world in which love, however fragile, is the key both to artistry and to building a worthwhile future. Tess Jolly interrogates the distances we create and uphold, but can ultimately bridge.

‘Intimate Architecture houses a Gothic panorama of ghosts, grinning gargoyles and “gossiping puppets” fixated on the body. A mouth is a “chamber of parliament debating […] the right amount to eat, the right amount to say”; a throat is “a ghoulish workshop”; and the head a “chewed skull” trapped in the shadows where malevolent mice create “The Mischief” of eating rituals. But there’s light and love amid the fear and loneliness, too, just through the side gate. There may still be dark woods, knotted undergrowth and precarious ridges to navigate, but there’s also the “confetti of stars” to guide a family, a seafront where lovers “feast on cockles” after clubbing and an estuary that “glints with wishes”. Here be nightmares but also nightingales “who open their beaks wider to sing” as “the forest imagines a different story” in this intimate collection abundant in courage and heart.’

Sarah Barnsley

Read a sample poem:

Intimate Architecture

Can the line I need to put between us  
be as fine as the napkins we peeled into layers
to make curtains, as delicate
as the roses we folded and strung
into garlands lit with tiny bulbs?

Can it be as soft as the pulp we dried
into carpets patterned with an archive of violets,
as flimsy as the sheets of newspaper
we pressed round thimbles and pebbles 
and painted for cups and bowls?

Can it be as fragile as the airmail letters 
we cut and bound into a library
of miniature books scribed
with elaborate stories, as translucent
as the parchment we scrolled into forests

where dreams were mapped into treasure?
Can it be as light as the fibres we crushed
to make our doll’s house walls,
as tender as our honeycomb of chambers
protected by paper-thin membranes?

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Reviews

In The High Window

In Tears in the Fence

In London Grip

Tess Jolly’s first full collection, Breakfast at the Origami Café, slides beneath emotional surfaces, the painted veneers we artfully create for ourselves, and enters the heart of darkness: loss, violence, trauma, recovery – delivered with a forensic eye for just the right amount of detail. This is art which is bold and yet vulnerable, precise in its use of language and yet passionately engaged, a book where shadows – both living and dead – are weighed, and found accountable, by an unflinching sun. 
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‘By force of imagination, these exacting poems make for a sophisticated debut which reconfigures experiences of family history, violence, illness and loss into rites of passage, charm or prayer. With a highly original gift for language, Tess Jolly’s work comes from the place where storytelling meets poetic revelation.’ 

Rachael Boast

Read a sample poem:

Breakfast at the Origami Café

Blown like leaves through the open door
the regulars settle to ambient music
as waitresses bring coffee and pastries,
hot chocolate frothing with cream.
A mother tenderly folds her daughter
at the waist, demonstrates making a swan.
Her husband invites her to crease
the dotted line of his spine, butterfly-paint
one tattooed side of his back to the other.
In her practised fingers he’s transformed
to an intricate bloom, a keepsake held
in the box she’s flexed from her body.
Scars speckle the exterior; her navel
is pressed into the lid like a rose in paper.
An elderly man sipping peppermint tea
watches her work, then slowly gathers
his skin into the snapping mouth of a fox.
Businessmen put away their phones,
collapse to a fleet of shining airplanes.
Soon turtles, stars, dragons, hats decorate
vacant tables while, outside, the wind
flays trees, warps lamp posts, drags bins
to different places. Nobody notices the girl
sitting alone by the window has vanished.
She must have folded herself smaller
and smaller until there was nowhere left to go.

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Thus the Blue Hour Comes  is a sequence of poems which explores the narrator’s journey away from home into a disturbing psychological world of restriction and disorder. In a realm which could be house, forest or fairy tale, presided over by a menacing, unnamed presence, ordinary objects such as clocks, furniture and flowers become frightening, and childhood games are dangerous. Finally recognising the place for what it is, the traveller must decide if and how to return.

‘The mysterious, almost unnerving, quality of Tess Jolly’s poetry carries a cold fire into recesses of the imagination – and when we dare look with her, we glimpse treasures gleaming in the dark. These are bold, spellbinding poems.’

Reviews

‘Between beauty and terror’ in Peter Kenny: a writer’s notebook

In the Poetry Book Society bulletin:

‘It’s a pleasure to see Tess Jolly’s poems brought together. Her densely-imaged verse combines a child’s perception of detail with an edge of fear, and elements of fairy tale with the surreal, verging on the Gothic. Everyday relationships become as richly textured as an illuminated manuscript.’

Anthony Mair

Review
‘A poet between worlds’ in Peter Kenny: a writer’s notebook