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Editorial Note by Max Wallis

Martha Sprackland’s Playcircle hums with both tenderness and alarm — a choreography of care performed on the edge of collapse. A doctor’s office becomes a kind of stage; the body, an instrument trying to tune itself against static. WhatsApp pings, bells, flutes, and pulse merge in a rhythm of overstimulation: the modern soundscape of survival.

The poem moves like a collective hallucination: parents, children, patients, friends, all bound in the same uncertain ritual. Its broken music asks, perhaps, what connection costs us. And how we keep ringing, even off the hook.

Sprackland captures that haunted overlap between play and panic, where touch and technology blur, and the simplest act — “pick up” — becomes both invocation and plea.

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. Follow her here:

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