Summary

In “Nightlines” Jackself and Jeremy Wren find themselves fishing late at night in the “kidney-coloured pool/all the streams of England run into” (23). After Wren says Jackself is “a soft lad, a quick-/tear, a worry-wit” Jackself gets up with his fishing line and wades into the waters “where no one has stood/for a thousand years” (23, 24). When Wren is not looking, Jackself stamps his foot down, awakening all of the fish, shaking them “out/of their gullible, muddy-minded dream” (24).

In the next poem “Cheapjack” Jeremy Wren shows Jackself all of the things he keeps in his pocket, including shriveled, eight-legged “patter,” which Wren says Jackself can use to “sell a man/a second shadow” if he wraps his tongue around it (25). When Jackself claims the patter is just an old spider, Wren tells him he has to “learn to overlook [his] own...