Dark Night

Sprackland’s new translation is both provocative and timely … In her consciously poeticising yet conscientious versions, the works themselves retain all the strangeness and burn that attracted TS Eliot and Salvador Dalí, Thomas Merton and Pope John Paul II

Fiona Sampson, Guardian

Sprackland's ear is particularly alive to movement and music ... the result is a St John of the Cross who feels neither embalmed nor modernised, but newly legible. This translation doesn't simply carry the poems across languages; it reanimates them

Leo Boix, Poetry Book Society Bulletin

[A] vibrant, moving and exciting translation ... [Sprackland's] St. John surpasses earlier efforts ... This is the ideal book for those coming for the first time to St John’s works, but it is much more than that. It will make an excellent travelling companion for the spiritual journey, in which the fire and music of the poetry and the short challenging words of the spiritual aphorisms mutually illuminate and enrich each other

Earl Collins, Diocese of Chichester, Irish Theological Quarterly

Dark Night is a real achievement. The poetry is sleek and stylish, the endnotes are erudite yet approachable, to say nothing of the well-handled selections from John’s prose commentaries. With clarity and colour, Sprackland’s brilliant new translations drop us headlong into John’s mysterious world

The Little Review