Poetry review – INTIMATE ARCHITECTURE: Jennifer Johnson admires Tess Jolly’s adroit use of language in poems that explore memory and imagination
Intimate Architecture
Tess Jolly
Blue Diode Press
ISBN 978-1-915108-35-7
64pp £10.00
Tess Jolly is a freelance copy editor and a widely published poet. Intimate Architecture is her second full collection which follows her first one, entitled Breakfast at the Origami Café. The second book has two sections and consists mostly of poems under a page long.
The title poem ‘Intimate Architecture’ makes use of examples of the meticulous effort the child persona once put into creating precise details of her doll’s house such as “the napkins we peeled into layers/to make curtains” or “the airmail letters/ we cut and bound into a library/ of miniature books …”. The question for the adult is about “the line I need to put between us” that she presumably hopes will enable the preservation of the most delicate part of her identity. At the end of the poem the question is whether the line can be “as tender as our honeycomb of chambers / protected by paper-thin membranes?”. Many of the poems in this book consist of an exploration of an adult version of these chambers or hollows.
In the poem ‘The Cello and the Nightingale’ which uses the 1924 radio hoax with the nightingale being, in fact, a siffleur (bird impressionist) the persona clearly feels unease when someone on the phone tries to reassure her about “feeling much better” but decides to “go along with the ruse”. Later she says, “though I can hear/ in your clipped repertoire/ signs you’re retreating into the thicket”. The unnatural sounding “clipped repertoire” sounds unconvincing. The thicket links back to the one referred to earlier in the poem in which “a nightingale would have startled/ as the recording crew tramped through the bushes”.
A feeling of unease is also well expressed in the final stanza of ‘Seventeen’.
Young and sweet, she’s clocked it –
shadowy figure walking towards her,
friend or foe and how to tell?
The trees wrap their arms
around her in shelter or capture,
and she’s far away from home.
The trees could be “friend or foe”, and an inexperienced young woman is unlikely to know which. In ‘The Tunnel’ a mother has fears “when my children are late and neither/ will answer the phone” and imagines how the “owls scroll through the tricks and traps of the dark”. This surreal image possibly suggests one of owls scrolling for information on a mobile phone.
Shadows of disasters make their presence felt in some of the poems. In ‘Guitar’, a poem about a collision between a child’s bike and a car, the persona, once she realises her son is alright, expresses in an original way a shadow of disaster “when my thoughts/ turned to how near life orbits its aftermath”. The persona thinks of “parents standing forever at bedroom doors”. Her son has thankfully survived, and the poem ends with how “he picked out slow, careful, hesitant notes” on his guitar. In the poem ‘Nightfall’ the persona thinks about the disaster that happened on the road she drives along to collect her daughter. “I think of how often/ we’d driven down the road where it smashed/ into flame”. This refers to a horrific incident in which an old aircraft flying in a nearby aerial display crashed onto a trunk road killing 11 people. Later the persona’s anxiety about her daughter is expressed by “but what shapes the trees suggest, what ideas form,/and the gate is no longer a gate but a boundary/ into the underworld”. The trees possibly link back to the ones in the previous poem ‘Seventeen’ and the gate to the first poem in the collection ‘The Gate’ in which we are told “the gate is all that’s asked of you”.
Memory is important in this collection. In ‘The Gate’ a didactic voice appears to guide the persona’s ghost through their memories including “the alley/ where you hid your first acorn hoard” and “aniseed balls that dissolved on your tongue”. A moving memory occurs at “the derelict bus shelter” when “your mum’s still explaining/ where to get off and what exactly to ask for”. In the poem ‘Crumbs’ also about memory the poet makes use of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. It begins
We’re following
the crumbs
we left for ourselves
back through the wood,
looking for the place
where we began.
Being a fairy tale, however, finding the place “where we began” proves impossible as we are told a few lines later “we’ve wandered so far/ through the bracken/ and heather” so the path is lost.
As might be expected from a collection written by a poet who makes a living as a copy editor, poems about language feature frequently. In the poem ‘White Horse Drive – Cecily’ we are told that “Shoals of nasty words/ are flicking about spittle-slick in the bowl/ of her throat”. Cecily tries to keep quiet but eventually “the words/ will come gushing out in a shower of bile” and “the hooks of Cecily’s words will be lodged /in the flesh of her nearest and dearest”. The reader is never told what the words are, only the quality of those words.
Anyone who has done this type of work will enjoy ‘Proofreading the Motorbike Manual’ which begins
I’m struggling to understand the meaning
of ‘float pivot pin’, ‘centrifugal filter’,
whether ‘values’ or ‘valves’ fits the context
In this poem the persona tries to ask a mechanic the meaning of these technical terms, but his “radio bleeps” takes him away “to jump-start another engine”. Copy editors will recognise the time spent thinking about which of two similar words fits in a particular context. In this case it is probably “valves”.
In summary, Intimate Architecture is a carefully written book of poems which intelligently express unease in different settings, the fragility of life, problems involved in exploring memory and some original considerations of language. I would therefore highly recommend this book.
Jul 1 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Tess Jolly
Poetry review – INTIMATE ARCHITECTURE: Jennifer Johnson admires Tess Jolly’s adroit use of language in poems that explore memory and imagination
Intimate Architecture
Tess Jolly
Blue Diode Press
ISBN 978-1-915108-35-7
64pp £10.00
Tess Jolly is a freelance copy editor and a widely published poet. Intimate Architecture is her second full collection which follows her first one, entitled Breakfast at the Origami Café. The second book has two sections and consists mostly of poems under a page long.
The title poem ‘Intimate Architecture’ makes use of examples of the meticulous effort the child persona once put into creating precise details of her doll’s house such as “the napkins we peeled into layers/to make curtains” or “the airmail letters/ we cut and bound into a library/ of miniature books …”. The question for the adult is about “the line I need to put between us” that she presumably hopes will enable the preservation of the most delicate part of her identity. At the end of the poem the question is whether the line can be “as tender as our honeycomb of chambers / protected by paper-thin membranes?”. Many of the poems in this book consist of an exploration of an adult version of these chambers or hollows.
In the poem ‘The Cello and the Nightingale’ which uses the 1924 radio hoax with the nightingale being, in fact, a siffleur (bird impressionist) the persona clearly feels unease when someone on the phone tries to reassure her about “feeling much better” but decides to “go along with the ruse”. Later she says, “though I can hear/ in your clipped repertoire/ signs you’re retreating into the thicket”. The unnatural sounding “clipped repertoire” sounds unconvincing. The thicket links back to the one referred to earlier in the poem in which “a nightingale would have startled/ as the recording crew tramped through the bushes”.
A feeling of unease is also well expressed in the final stanza of ‘Seventeen’.
Young and sweet, she’s clocked it –
shadowy figure walking towards her,
friend or foe and how to tell?
The trees wrap their arms
around her in shelter or capture,
and she’s far away from home.
The trees could be “friend or foe”, and an inexperienced young woman is unlikely to know which. In ‘The Tunnel’ a mother has fears “when my children are late and neither/ will answer the phone” and imagines how the “owls scroll through the tricks and traps of the dark”. This surreal image possibly suggests one of owls scrolling for information on a mobile phone.
Shadows of disasters make their presence felt in some of the poems. In ‘Guitar’, a poem about a collision between a child’s bike and a car, the persona, once she realises her son is alright, expresses in an original way a shadow of disaster “when my thoughts/ turned to how near life orbits its aftermath”. The persona thinks of “parents standing forever at bedroom doors”. Her son has thankfully survived, and the poem ends with how “he picked out slow, careful, hesitant notes” on his guitar. In the poem ‘Nightfall’ the persona thinks about the disaster that happened on the road she drives along to collect her daughter. “I think of how often/ we’d driven down the road where it smashed/ into flame”. This refers to a horrific incident in which an old aircraft flying in a nearby aerial display crashed onto a trunk road killing 11 people. Later the persona’s anxiety about her daughter is expressed by “but what shapes the trees suggest, what ideas form,/and the gate is no longer a gate but a boundary/ into the underworld”. The trees possibly link back to the ones in the previous poem ‘Seventeen’ and the gate to the first poem in the collection ‘The Gate’ in which we are told “the gate is all that’s asked of you”.
Memory is important in this collection. In ‘The Gate’ a didactic voice appears to guide the persona’s ghost through their memories including “the alley/ where you hid your first acorn hoard” and “aniseed balls that dissolved on your tongue”. A moving memory occurs at “the derelict bus shelter” when “your mum’s still explaining/ where to get off and what exactly to ask for”. In the poem ‘Crumbs’ also about memory the poet makes use of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale. It begins
We’re following
the crumbs
we left for ourselves
back through the wood,
looking for the place
where we began.
Being a fairy tale, however, finding the place “where we began” proves impossible as we are told a few lines later “we’ve wandered so far/ through the bracken/ and heather” so the path is lost.
As might be expected from a collection written by a poet who makes a living as a copy editor, poems about language feature frequently. In the poem ‘White Horse Drive – Cecily’ we are told that “Shoals of nasty words/ are flicking about spittle-slick in the bowl/ of her throat”. Cecily tries to keep quiet but eventually “the words/ will come gushing out in a shower of bile” and “the hooks of Cecily’s words will be lodged /in the flesh of her nearest and dearest”. The reader is never told what the words are, only the quality of those words.
Anyone who has done this type of work will enjoy ‘Proofreading the Motorbike Manual’ which begins
I’m struggling to understand the meaning
of ‘float pivot pin’, ‘centrifugal filter’,
whether ‘values’ or ‘valves’ fits the context
In this poem the persona tries to ask a mechanic the meaning of these technical terms, but his “radio bleeps” takes him away “to jump-start another engine”. Copy editors will recognise the time spent thinking about which of two similar words fits in a particular context. In this case it is probably “valves”.
In summary, Intimate Architecture is a carefully written book of poems which intelligently express unease in different settings, the fragility of life, problems involved in exploring memory and some original considerations of language. I would therefore highly recommend this book.