Editorial Note by Max Wallis
In Hazard Perception, Martha Sprackland recasts the road’s sudden dangers: kerbs, erratic bicycles, stags leaping from the verge as the psychic terrain of motherhood. Hazards are everywhere, made sharper by exhaustion: “the baby woke fourteen times last night,” thought turns sluggish, the brain itself “a lettuce completely eaten by slugs.” The poem’s hallucinatory images mimic the way fatigue distorts perception, how care leaves the body porous to threat.
What begins with absurd humour: ponies on a dual carriageway, cartoon-like collisions darkens into a vision of inheritance: the child grown, guiding the parent to the hospital, both staring at “the backlit picture of your brain.” Here, hazard perception is no longer a test of the road but of life itself: how to notice, endure, and keep moving even as the future bristles with danger.
Sprackland shows that to mother is to live among hazards: surreal, comic, terrifying and yet to persist anyway.
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About Martha
Martha Sprackland is an editor, writer and translator. Her debut collection of poems, CITADEL (Pavilion, 2020), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Costa Poetry Award. Her new translation of the poems and prose of sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross is forthcoming from Penguin Classics.
