Poem of the week: Tooth by Martha Sprackland

Poets usually deal in intense feelings: love, loss, remorse. But in this poem from her Forward Prize-nominated debut Citadel, a Telegraph poetry book of the month, Martha Sprackland captures a kind of pain that can be just as intense and all-encompassing, but which almost never turns up in poems – toothache.

It might remind you of Sylvia Plath’s famous “Cut”, where a similar torrent of metaphors flows from another seemingly trivial hurt (a nicked finger); in both, a tiny “clamorous point” becomes the centre of the world. The nagging "aw" rhymes (jaw, sore, raw) at the end of each stanza create a sense of being trapped, without any escape from the agony. At one point, the poet breaks the pattern to cry "I want it out!" – but the aching rhyme is back in the very next stanza. Even her lover, with his "skin like cotton, outside the pain", can't offer her a reprieve.

Tooth

Like a round grey stone lodged
in the fork of a tree
the tooth sits intractably
at the far back of the mouth
between the ear and the jaw.

The mouth can’t close fully,
like a freezer door;
can’t crank itself open
more than a few gear-teeth’s width,
enough for water through a straw.

At night it wakes up
like an eyeball, lolls sourly on the tongue
rolls against the drum
tampers with the hinge
and rubs it raw.

Nothing to do, between the shift-
change of the painkillers
but listen to my bedmate
breathing asleep and the foghorns
in the hot harbour.

All the world’s cameras
are on this clamorous point:
this knot, this bole, this clot,
this breaking news, this fire,
this prisoner of war,

a sealed world seething
like a black egg
incorruptible by amoxicillin
and saline wash.
I want it out.

I go down to the dockside,
oily between the cruise ships
and Maersk containers,
to gargle palmfuls of the sea
against the hard bezoar

and its faulty magic.
I idle towards
the half-bottle of whiskey,
the red-handled relief
in the kitchen drawer,

but Ed shifts and turns against me,
skin like cotton, outside the pain,
and says through sleep –
his clean sound mouth –
Honey, are you still sore?

I can’t answer
round the cobblestone,
the ship, the choke, the pliers,
the acorn cracked
and pushing through the floor.

Citadel is published by Pavilion/LUP at ￡9.99. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop