Jacob Polley: ‘I’m a fool as a writer – you have to take risks’ | Books | The Guardian

Did the novel make Jackself possible? There's the obvious similarity of subject, but also the control of narrative, the sense of character. "I don't know - one of the things about writing the novel was that it threw me back to writing poems with a renewed sense of the possibility of the poem," says Polley. So, for instance, he discovered that he loved "writing dialogue - that's something you don't really experiment with or do much in poems". And with dialogue came the ability to use shifting points of view, of a narrator, of Jackself, "a soft-lad, a quick- / tear, a worry-wit" - at least according to his friend, the mercurial, charismatic, elementally sad Jeremy Wren.