Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog

I stumbled across Martha Sprackland’s debut collection, Citadel, in Desperate Literature, a wonderful little bookshop off the Plaza Santo Domingo in Madrid last month. The poet, originally from Liverpool, now divides her time between London and Madrid, and she thanks the bookstore in the acknowledgments of her book. The collection intrigued me because of its size–a bit taller and thinner than the old City Lights paperbooks–and the paper wrapped around it proclaiming it as a staff favorite.

Inside, I found a captivating mix of poems that seemed to alternate between, as the back cover indicates, a “composite ‘I’–part Reformation-era monarch, part twenty-first century poet.” The monarch is Juana of Castile, “sixteenth-century Queen of Spain and daughter of the instigators of the Inquisition,” the so-called “Joanna the Mad.” The book was published in 2020 and shortlisted for the John Pollard International Poetry Prize in 2021, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2020, and the 2020 Costa Poetry Award.

Cocido madrileño is a traditional stew from Madrid with meat and vegetables in a chickpea (garbanzo bean) base. I picked this poem to share because it is indicative of Sprackland’s gift for moving between the present and the past in this collection. I look forward to reading more of her work in the future. 

Here is the poem in its entirety:

Cocido Madrileño

It was an unexplainable hunger, like a gravel pit,

and it wouldn’t go away. Sickness like a fingernail moon

around its darkness. Juana went to the bodega

and bought six tins of cocido ridged

like braziers, Litoral stamped in red along

the white coastline, the meats reclining

in an adoring harem of chickpeas.

Juana’s faith was on the wane but pork would prove it.

Morcilla, chorizo, tocino de ibérico, panceta,

soft white lard and blood and bone and smoke

tipped over the lip and into the pit, like a body

she desperately wanted to be rid of.

This, she believed, would sate her, save her.

–Martha Sprackland, from CITADEL

Learn more about the poet: Martha Sprackland

Click here to purchase Citadel directly from the publisher, Liverpool University Press.