These Silent Mansions

A life in graveyards

By: Jean Sprackland

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Paperback | 4 February 2021

At a Glance

Paperback
240 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.5 x 12.5 x 2

Paperback

$31.40

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'A refreshingly original meditation on a huge but widely ignored subject: the relationship between the living and the dead... I wish I had written it myself.' Literary Review

Graveyards are oases: places of escape, of peace and reflection. Each is a garden or nature reserve, but also a site of commemoration, where the past is close enough to touch: a liminal place, at the border of the living world.

Jean Sprackland's prize-winning book, Strands, brought to life the histories of objects found on a beach. These Silent Mansions is also an uncovering of individual stories: vivid, touching and intimately told. Sprackland travels back through her own life, revisiting graveyards in the ordinary towns and cities she has called home, seeking out others who lived, died and are remembered or forgotten there. With her poet's eye, she makes chance discoveries among the stones and inscriptions: a notorious smuggler tucked up in a sleepy churchyard; ancient coins unearthed on a secret burial ground; a slow-worm basking in the sun.

These Silent Mansions is an elegant, exhilarating meditation on the relationship between the living and the dead, the nature of time and loss, and how - in this restless, accelerated world - we can connect the here with the elsewhere, the present with the past.

Industry Reviews

A wide-ranging, unpredictable and refreshingly original meditation on a huge but widely ignored subject: the relationship between the living and the dead... Exhilarating... This is a lovely book: beautifully written, never lapsing into self-conscious 'poet's prose', always a joy to read. I wish I had written it myself. -- Nigel Andrew * Literary Review *
Cemetery tales, filled with fascinating details and told with a poet's skill... Delightfully morbid... Sprackland roves about history, language, biology, architecture, entomology, iconography and much else in her quest for meaning... [and] the astonishing twist...should justify your reading These Silent Mansions in its entirety. -- Anthony Quinn * Guardian *
Shot through with delightful digressions... There is a spare beauty to Sprackland's prose... These Silent Mansions is a strange and mercurial book; hard to pin down, but even harder to forget. -- Lucy Scholes * i *
Sprackland has the poet's knack for atmosphere and a magician's ability to conjure up other worlds. She is like a ghostly time traveller... Sprackland is particularly agile, though, at exploring the ways in which a graveyard reflects its community and how, with modern life, we are losing this sense of connection. -- Ann Treneman * The Times *
Part social history, part personal meditation and wholly enchanting - as attentive to local and moving details as it is to the fact of mortality itself. -- Andrew Motion

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