Skip to main content
Read page text
page 42
collections aim to disrupt. It’s also potentially disingenuous: if poetry is to shift how we see, are the ecological visions it offers genuinely different to those it claims to disavow? And can such poetry really be said to be ‘universal’, and thus the ‘most ideal’ way to understand the climate crisis, if it’s often obscure to the point of inaccessibility for all but the most literary of readers? In 100 Poems, the speaker of Wendell Berry’s ‘The Peace of Wild Things’ finds refuge from climate anxiety in the waters that surround his house: When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the last sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water […] I come into the peace of wild things […] I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. Like many of us living in the Global North, this speaker is only now sensing the real extent of the climate crisis, because they finally see how it might encroach on their life. The nature that becomes their sanctuary is explicitly ‘wild’, a seemingly unpopulated retreat in which human activity is reassuringly absent, giving way to a soothing aestheticism. This vision of nature, as a luscious, green and sensory escape, has pervaded nature writing historically, and continues to do so. It’s a tendency that manifests in different ways across 100 Poems; in one poem we travel through a ‘lane stitched with hazel’ and hear a ‘beehive’s sultry / murmur’ (Seán Hewitt, ‘Meadow’), while in another we see ‘white hens [pecking] at shreds of light’ and smell ‘honeysuckle air’ (Jennifer Hunt, ‘September’). ‘Don’t wait to walk out […] to the boggy fields’, instructs Em Strang, and her energetic poem ‘Water of Ae’, encapsulates what so many of these poets imply: that to connect with nature we must go out and find it, before it disappears. Of course, there’s nothing objectively wrong with that; in the context of the ecological emergency, it seems fitting to write words that revel in and memorialise those sites of loss. But in doing so, many of these poems – particularly when read together – inadvertently perpetuate traditional ideas of nature: it is, in Morton’s words, a ‘reified thing in the distance’, opposed to humans and civilisation. That interconnection we must seek if we are to achieve ecological balance, the messy enmeshment of the human and nonhuman, is lost to a pastoral idyll that may never have existed and feels increasingly disconnected from our ecological realities. But there are also poems that are actively wary of this perspective, acknowledging the way such aestheticism can accidentally commodify; Out of Time aims to distance itself from a ‘neo-Romanticism’ that celebrates the beauty of nature. In Cath Drake’s ‘What I’m Making With the World’, the speaker turns the world itself into a handbag: she ‘cut around the best bits: / the Alps, Machu Picchu, Pyramids, Grand Canyon, and ditched / the ugly blots like Calcutta, Guatemala, Brisbane […] endless boring tower blocks’. In 100 Poems, Samuel Tongue turns deliberately to the mundane and ugly: his poem ‘Fish Counter’ studies ‘[c]od that have been skinned. Cod that have a pebble / of dill butter in their heads’, ‘pollock, de-scented’ and ‘[f]ish fingers mashed from fragments of once-fish’. His poem suggests that the relations between the human and nonhuman are largely global, economic and consumeristic; it captures the dissonance of imagining a fish as part of the ‘peace of wild things’ and encountering it as a dead bit of meat in a brightly lit supermarket. The editors of both anthologies state their intention to seek out an intersectional lens: in 100 Poems, Brigley and Evans note that ‘the voices gathered[…] often speak in terms of ecological justice’, while the introduction for Out of Time states that the climate crisis is ‘inextricably tied to the metrics of justice’. While both anthologies could include more poems that genuinely confront the political nature of the climate crisis, those that do so do it very well. In particular, I find myself thinking of Marvin Thompson’s ‘Whilst Searching for Anansi with My Mixed Race Children in the Blaen Bran Community Woodland’ (100 Poems), and of Gboyega Odubanjo’s ‘Oil Music’ (Out of Time), for weeks after I read them. Thompson’s speaker encounters a fox, lying deathly still: ‘Dad, is it dead?’, his children ask, intrigued. He cannot engage as they do: ‘Inside my head / are Mark Duggan’s smile and last night’s heavy dread: / I dreamt his death again’. The fox in front of him is a hollow, mangled echo of the human injustices and deaths that fill the speaker’s mind and memory, distancing him from the woodland environment. But when he dismisses the fox as dead, his children protest: ‘It’s breathing, Dad […] Listen, hard!’ Through their eyes, a simple tenderness emerges: ‘[t]he fox’s eyes listen.’ Mark Duggan is present in the poem, but so is the fox – not because they are equal in the mind of the speaker, but because these realities emerge intertwined, in strange conversation. The inherent connection between racism and the environment is made explicit by Odubanjo’s ‘Oil Music’, which riffs on Blackness and fossil fuel extraction to explore the insidious processes of racial capitalism. As he writes: i’ll get the bathtub ready. i’m in. we in ceramic. let’s say black. i’m bp. you’re shell. we all in. we in the black. we both in a barrel. call it a village. we both in the pumping. the people no get no nothing. A bathtub becomes a barrel of oil, which becomes a synecdoche for the oil industry in general as it gains material riches – black oil – through destroying Black people’s lives and lands. As the poem continues, this 40 Poetry London | Spring 2022
page 43
clipped voice begins to inhabit the vernacular, edging towards the people who ‘get no nothing’: […] no day de pas where they no dey cry suffer dis kind suffer like dis. we no care for them. It’s hard to read this poem and not think of the devastation Shell is responsible for in the Niger Delta, where extraction, oil spills and human rights abuses have destroyed communities, and where the Ogoni Nine – activists who opposed Shell’s activities in the region, fighting for the rights of the indigenous Ogoni people – were executed by a complicit state. As Odubanjo makes clear, the climate crisis is about power: rich capitalists extracting wealth and resources from poorer countries, often in the Global South, with no regard for the lives they are destroying. The failure to acknowledge this relationship of power is what makes some of the poems in both collections so frustrating. In Dom Bury’s ‘Threshold’ (100 Poems), the speaker argues that ‘This is the hour we face our own extinction’ (emphasis my own), concluding ‘[s]o if we need to be shown our collective death to come back / in the very nick of time / to life, to our collective love, / to understand what it means to be human / let it be so’. This passivity, and sense of collectiveness, in the face of extinction, ignores the fact that this crisis is not just happening now, but has been going on for decades, and it sidesteps the power imbalances inherent to it. It’s not as though fossil fuel capitalists in the Global North, once they’ve understood the possibility of their own extinction, will become any nicer to the people whose oil they want to extract in Nigeria. And when the speaker of Mariah Whelan’s ‘Geography Lessons’ (Out of Time) hypothesises that ‘extinction might not be the world / ending but a correction, righting itself of its heavy, human tilt’, I feel deeply uneasy: it seems dangerous to suggest that human extinction could be for the greater good, that humanity at large is responsible for the crisis, as opposed to specific individuals and systems. As with most anthologies, both 100 Poems and Out of Time are varied in quality. There are poems that intrigue me, poems that – like Thompson’s and Odubanjo’s – lift me out of myself and make me regard the crisis anew. But there are also poems that make me roll my eyes, and the occasional poem that angers me. Admittedly, much of my reaction is shaped by how they’re packaged, perhaps perversely so – as I read them, I cannot stop thinking well, what will this do? I am sure that this is not always – perhaps it is never – the right way to read poetry. But if the editors argue that such poetry can help us understand and respond to the climate crisis, that’s the metric I want to hold it up to. As a thought experiment: even if all these poems were brilliant at discussing the climate crisis, and these anthologies became bestsellers, would anything substantial change? Writing in the London Review of Books recently, James Butler argued that ‘belief in the saving power of climate awareness is obdurate in climate activism […] If only we knew, we would act in the right way. But there is no obvious point at which knowledge tips into action […] spreading awareness ends up as a substitute for action itself’. And as Auden wrote in his poem ‘In Memory of W B Yeats’: […] poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. Poetry does not in itself constitute action; we would be unwise to overemphasise its capacity to inspire change. But as a form of expression, it can also be a ‘happening’ – a coming alive of an idea or feeling. It is perhaps best when it is unabashedly unpragmatic, when it does not pretend to ‘do’ anything. As Rishi Dastidar concludes at the end of ‘New planet who dis?’ (Out of Time), a surreal account of a climate-tinged dream: ‘what you want a moral / too? fuck off’. Taking this at its word, we might likewise conclude that moral, practical thinking, of the urgent kind required by our moment, is best suited to the world beyond the poem. Nicole Jashapara is a writer and editor based in South London. She is a staff writer at Bad Form and an editorial assistant at The Willowherb Review and 4th Estate. Poetry London | Spring 2022 41

Page Text

View plaintext

collections aim to disrupt. It’s also potentially disingenuous: if poetry is to shift how we see, are the ecological visions it offers genuinely different to those it claims to disavow? And can such poetry really be said to be ‘universal’, and thus the ‘most ideal’ way to understand the climate crisis, if it’s often obscure to the point of inaccessibility for all but the most literary of readers?

In 100 Poems, the speaker of Wendell Berry’s ‘The Peace of Wild Things’ finds refuge from climate anxiety in the waters that surround his house:

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the last sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water […] I come into the peace of wild things […] I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. Like many of us living in the Global North, this speaker is only now sensing the real extent of the climate crisis, because they finally see how it might encroach on their life. The nature that becomes their sanctuary is explicitly ‘wild’, a seemingly unpopulated retreat in which human activity is reassuringly absent, giving way to a soothing aestheticism. This vision of nature, as a luscious, green and sensory escape, has pervaded nature writing historically, and continues to do so. It’s a tendency that manifests in different ways across 100 Poems; in one poem we travel through a ‘lane stitched with hazel’ and hear a ‘beehive’s sultry / murmur’ (Seán Hewitt, ‘Meadow’), while in another we see ‘white hens [pecking] at shreds of light’ and smell ‘honeysuckle air’ (Jennifer Hunt, ‘September’). ‘Don’t wait to walk out […] to the boggy fields’, instructs Em Strang, and her energetic poem ‘Water of Ae’, encapsulates what so many of these poets imply: that to connect with nature we must go out and find it, before it disappears.

Of course, there’s nothing objectively wrong with that; in the context of the ecological emergency, it seems fitting to write words that revel in and memorialise those sites of loss. But in doing so, many of these poems – particularly when read together – inadvertently perpetuate traditional ideas of nature: it is, in Morton’s words, a ‘reified thing in the distance’, opposed to humans and civilisation. That interconnection we must seek if we are to achieve ecological balance, the messy enmeshment of the human and nonhuman, is lost to a pastoral idyll that may never have existed and feels increasingly disconnected from our ecological realities.

But there are also poems that are actively wary of this perspective, acknowledging the way such aestheticism can accidentally commodify; Out of Time aims to distance itself from a ‘neo-Romanticism’ that celebrates the beauty of nature. In Cath Drake’s ‘What I’m Making With the World’, the speaker turns the world itself into a handbag: she ‘cut around the best bits: / the Alps, Machu Picchu,

Pyramids, Grand Canyon, and ditched / the ugly blots like Calcutta, Guatemala, Brisbane […] endless boring tower blocks’. In 100 Poems, Samuel Tongue turns deliberately to the mundane and ugly: his poem ‘Fish Counter’ studies ‘[c]od that have been skinned. Cod that have a pebble / of dill butter in their heads’, ‘pollock, de-scented’ and ‘[f]ish fingers mashed from fragments of once-fish’. His poem suggests that the relations between the human and nonhuman are largely global, economic and consumeristic; it captures the dissonance of imagining a fish as part of the ‘peace of wild things’ and encountering it as a dead bit of meat in a brightly lit supermarket.

The editors of both anthologies state their intention to seek out an intersectional lens: in 100 Poems, Brigley and Evans note that ‘the voices gathered[…] often speak in terms of ecological justice’, while the introduction for Out of Time states that the climate crisis is ‘inextricably tied to the metrics of justice’. While both anthologies could include more poems that genuinely confront the political nature of the climate crisis, those that do so do it very well. In particular, I find myself thinking of Marvin Thompson’s ‘Whilst Searching for Anansi with My Mixed Race Children in the Blaen Bran Community Woodland’ (100 Poems), and of Gboyega Odubanjo’s ‘Oil Music’ (Out of Time), for weeks after I read them.

Thompson’s speaker encounters a fox, lying deathly still: ‘Dad, is it dead?’, his children ask, intrigued. He cannot engage as they do: ‘Inside my head / are Mark Duggan’s smile and last night’s heavy dread: / I dreamt his death again’. The fox in front of him is a hollow, mangled echo of the human injustices and deaths that fill the speaker’s mind and memory, distancing him from the woodland environment. But when he dismisses the fox as dead, his children protest: ‘It’s breathing, Dad […] Listen, hard!’ Through their eyes, a simple tenderness emerges: ‘[t]he fox’s eyes listen.’ Mark Duggan is present in the poem, but so is the fox – not because they are equal in the mind of the speaker, but because these realities emerge intertwined, in strange conversation.

The inherent connection between racism and the environment is made explicit by Odubanjo’s ‘Oil Music’, which riffs on Blackness and fossil fuel extraction to explore the insidious processes of racial capitalism. As he writes:

i’ll get the bathtub ready. i’m in. we in ceramic. let’s say black. i’m bp. you’re shell. we all in. we in the black. we both in a barrel. call it a village. we both in the pumping. the people no get no nothing. A bathtub becomes a barrel of oil, which becomes a synecdoche for the oil industry in general as it gains material riches – black oil – through destroying Black people’s lives and lands. As the poem continues, this

40 Poetry London | Spring 2022

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content