This amazing response from Michaela Ridgway, artist, friend, international conference organiser and facilitator of poetry readings. It's always a surprise to see how someone else responds to your work, but beautiful when they are as generous with their time as Michaela.
"From morning until late afternoon, I turn page after page. A large flock of geese flies overhead, unnoticed. Starlings gather for shelter under a piertop Wetherspoons. Meteorites fall. Stars fall. The planets hum. A vixen curls up on a pile of folded jumpers.
"As the complicated facts of being a female human—getting old, aloneness, motherhood, longing, departures, chores, invisibility, love—are laid out against an oblivious but comforting presence of the non-human, my tea goes cold.
"Like a year and a life, the book is divided into four parts: Silk, Sinkhole, Something About Species, Estuary. Each section has its own weight, and the opening poem, How to Mend a Sheet, is a showstopper in a collection that consistently takes your breath away without showing off about it.
"There are no exhausting verbal gymnastics or ‘ta-daaa!’ exit lines in Wills’ writing. This isn’t candyfloss poetry. It is serious, transcendent, grown-up poetry full of compassion and hope: a book to devour in one sitting, then savour in the years to come." © Michaela Ridgway 2026
Making the Wedding Dress puts Cruella de Vil on the train to Brighton and ancient philosophers on its pebble beach. A sequence on sewing culminates in making her daughter's wedding dress. Insects, animals and plants are backlit by war or extinction. Her poems are witty and surreal, her poems are set in places of escape, sanctuary, home and on the road. Cholmondely Award 2023 judge Moniza Alvi wrote: "She has been writing explorative, compassionate and often mesmerising poetry for many years. Wills explores with grace and verve what it is to be human."
Endorsed by four fellow poets:
'Making the Wedding Dress' is a collection that holds 'in tension' Jackie Wills's many interests and concerns. From the disturbing intimacy of needlework to the discoveries of aging and the consolations and concerns of the natural world, here are poems that say what needs to be said. Terrifically readable, full of thought and reflection, this is a book born of clear-eyed observation and beautifully shaped language. Jonathan Davidson
In ‘Making the Wedding Dress’, Jackie Wills shows us what it means to care for others, the planet and ourselves. There is a beautiful capability in Wills’ poems to take us deep inside a richness of worlds – familial, natural, corporeal – where we can meditate the tenuousness and meaning that is found within them. Rebecca Goss
The poems in Making the wedding dress are sewn with a lyrical needle connecting family and community to womanhood and ageing to nature and sinkholes to commitments, personal and political. Their compelling voice enacts a restless energy, in form and authoritative approach. Jackie Wills's keen eye notices 'the purest yellow opening in the sun like full skirts.' One poem ends 'look, look, look, look!' and Wills obeys her own music in this rich, fierce, searching collection.”
Robert Hamberger
The whole collection is fearless; faces loneliness, cruelty, loss, aging. Holds others and self to account. Revels in the glory of the world and mourns what has passed. Finds ways to keep afloat - indeed swim - and to move the reader.
Sonya Smith
Making the Wedding Dress is available from Salt Publishing
@Saltpublishing
Cover image by Jane Sybilla Fordham
@janesybillafordham
@jackiewillsbooks
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