The Great Big Green Week – Day Five

“Seed”

Willow cut to its hidden houses
something secret furls,
unfurls its stem-self –

seed
slopes slews
under crystal
skin
(its)
flesh
blooms
to tone –
coralling a milky alumben
in water’s distress,
floats,

|stays|
alive
winds its silver
thread in brine –
fleshed frond
&
secret,

still –

a
silver thread
pulls-up
willow’s
Ochre
curtain.

Truncated
Cut, yet
I saw it —
willowGrove

willowGrief —

winter/flower/blossoms

lie on wet ground

bereft of their generations,

seed will lie

| seed will lie |

-Chris Murray

WHAT IS GEOPOETRY?

-Andrew Abraham From a kid collecting fossils in Lyme Regis, through the realms of academia and a geological career exploring for metals in remote regions of the world, Andy has lived, breathed, and felt Earth’s dynamic processes. Geology and geosciences are his passion, but his observation of fabrics and textures go beyond rock- and ore-forming processes to their beauty and connectivity to those defining our psyche and cultural diversity. His art and writing holistically incorporate his deep interest in life and the natural world around us. He retired from geology to focus on his artwork and fell into poetry as a way to convey his thoughts on geology, global challenges, and the absurdity of life, politics and more. He is known for his humorous geological rewrites of famous Christmas carols and songs, lives in Toronto Canada, and yearns to travel the post-COVID world.His images and some of his writing can be found on www.instagram.com/artisticrocktextures/ “When I briefly told attendees about my years conducting geochronological research, John Lane challenged me to consider writing something on Deep Time. “Geochronology was an important part of my Ph.D. research. I realized back then that the ages of the rocks I was studying were incomprehensible to many outside of geology, yet I spoke of the errors of each rock’s age in +/- one or two million years. Not one year, not a century or millennia. Sometimes, even I catch myself and find it hard to believe that a tiny crystal can tell us how old parts of our Earth are. The recorded recital was included as part of a Geopoetry Slam at this year’s European Geosciences Union General Assembly.”

Zircon 2020, UK https://vimeo.com/551412950

–David Banks

Vigo Lane

2020, UK

being a song about mine water performed by Poke O’Swedgers

https://pokeoswedgers.bandcamp.com/track/vigo-lane

-John Bolland

John Bolland is a writer, artist and musician. He lives the North East of Scotland. His short fiction and poetry have been widely published in magazines and anthologies. His first full poetry collection – Fallen Stock – was published by Red Squirrel in 2019. He has been a prize winner in the Fish International Short Story Competition and runner-up in the Royal Society for Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Prize.A member of the STEM Poets group and a graduate of Glasgow University’s M.Litt., he has collaborated in residencies ranging from an Aberdeen PR agency to St. Andrew’s Universities Theology department. Originally trained as a chemist, John has focussed exclusively on his writing and other creative projects since 2014 after a long, parallel career in the oil & gas industry. His work explores the experience of working in the extractive industries and the issues of inter-generational responsibilities that arise from this experience. He is currently finalising a new poetry collection and performance piece – Pibroch – which explores parallels between the Climate Emergency and the Piper Alpha disaster (1988) and has recently completed a novel, Threads, set in Angola, Scotland and the USA which explores themes of extractivism and neo-colonialism. www.aviewfromthelonggrass.com

Blur Times 2020, UK Blur Times combines film-poems created as part of my spoken-word project – Pibroch – with a series of geocouplets reflecting on the nature and experience of time. Pibroch is a poetry collection and spoken word performance which explores parallels between the (current) Climate Emergency and the Piper Alpha disaster which occurred in the North Sea in 1988. As a former oil & gas worker and activist with Extinction Rebellion, I was struck by the parallels and empathic disconnect between these two narratives. I perceived a mutual failure in compassion as oil and gas interests continued to pursue catastrophic projects whilst some climate activists did not seem to empathise with the experience of workers in these industries who were, in the case of Piper Alpha literally, trapped on a burning platform. We are all, currently, trapped on this burning platform – and, as in 1988, we are continuing to pump hydrocarbons into the flames. In the course of awareness raising and activism during 2019, however, I was also aware of a parallel ‘fatalistic’ strand of responses to the Climate Emergency: a scientifically correct view that, in the long durée of geological time, this fluctuation in global atmospheric composition and, thereby, temperature was neither unprecedented nor extreme. As an oil & gas colleague once assured me (repeatedly): ‘At the end of the day, we’re all just a thin black line in a cliff.’ In responding to the Geological Society’s call for submissions, I was aware (as a trained physical scientist with a lifelong interest in geology) of these parallel truths: the urgency and vitality of life and the resilience and continuity of biophysical processes. This seems to me to demand a critical exploration of the experience and significance of time itself – questions of both its granularity – in moments, seasons, lifetimes, generations, kalpas – and its direction. The geocouplets in Blur Times attempt to challenge the vital urgency of the film-poems with an objective relativity. Elements of contemporary quantum gravitational theory suggest that time is not a variable in the fundamental equations which describe being and theoretical physicists, such as Carlo Rovelli, have suggested, tentatively, that it is the sensitivity of ‘life’ to entropy – the driver of ‘times arrow’ – which creates the delusion of time. This physical challenge to both the anthropocentric and the geological narrative prompts, I believe, serious ethical questions about the ‘discounting’ of the value of ‘future’ experience in personal and political decision-making: for example, my life and my great-great grandchild’s life are, in a sense, co-present. Perhaps time, for us, exists because of entropic blurring. This theme, the bedrock of physical reality and the fluidity of experience remains a continuing inspiration in my work. Publication of Pibroch by Red Squirrel Press is expected in 2021.

Ken Cockburn is a poet, translator, editor and writing tutor based in Edinburgh. After several years working at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, since 2004 he has freelanced, working in schools, colleges, care and community settings, and collaborating with visual artists on book, exhibition and public art projects. He also runs Edinburgh Poetry Tours, guided walks with readings of poems in the city’s Old Town. 2021 sees The Caseroom Press publish his pamphlet, Edinburgh: poems and translations.kencockburn.co.uk  edinburghpoetrytours.co.uk

Close 2020, UK Poet: Ken Cockburn Close was written in 1996, when The Scotsman newspaper offices were still in the impressive building which fronts onto North Bridge, and whose lower walls form part of Fleshmarket Close; when buses still ran up and down the High Street (it is now largely pedestrianised); and when my daughter was four years old.

Patrick is a geologist and poet. Born in Surrey he moved to Purbeck (Dorset) at a young age and grew up there. He developed a love of geology and worked as a professional and academic geologist for 35 years before retiring, when he took up poetry and returned to his roots. He is on the Board of the Scottish Poetry Library and is involved with the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics and the School of Poets in Edinburgh.Patrick has degrees in geology, statistics and petroleum engineering from Exeter, University College London, Kingston and Heriot-Watt Universities. He is Professor Emeritus at Heriot-Watt University and has a strong interest in the University’s heritage and alumni (the latter as Vice President of the Watt Club). He is a Fellow of the Geological Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has a strong interest in using poetry to improve the communication of geoscience and science in general (particularly with respect to Energy, Climate Change and the Anthropocene). www.geopoetrick.co.uk

Bare Bones 2020, UK Poet: Patrick Corbett The topography of the Isle of Purbeck is captured in this poetic traverse from the fields and quarries down to the coast.  Inland stone quarries have exploited, over centuries, the folded limestone as the sea erodes it through the endless drive from the westerly storms – storms which cause everyone to take shelter in the pub where their stories and memories will perhaps remain.

-Yvonne Reddick is a poet, researcher and editor. Her latest book is Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet. She is an AHRC Leadership Fellow, researching poets’ responses to debates about the Anthropocene. Her interest in geopoetry springs from hearing tales of life offshore from her father, who was a petroleum engineer. Her recent creative work is based on the tension between her wish to remember his life and work, and her concerns about fossil fuels as a cause of climate change. Her poetry has appeared in The Guardian Review and her critical work in the Times Literary Supplement.

Reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal

2020, UK

Read by Yvonne Reddick

‘I’m interested in finding adventurous women writers from the past whose footsteps I can follow in. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals give us her perspective on everything from hillwalking to travels through Europe. I admire the vivid way she conjures up place – you feel as though you’re there in 1803, making your way up Arthur’s Seat with her! When I think about the ‘deep time’ of the volcano’s formation, I’m also reminded of the layers and lines of literary history that inspire me and many others.’

-Phil Ringrose has followed his interest in poetry in parallel to his professional career in geoscience, mainly by publishing poetry as a hobby through his online web site. Having lived in India, Scotland and Norway, and drawing on his career as an Earth scientist, including field work in the Sahara and Greenland, his poetry takes a highly global perspective asking questions about humanity, sustainability and our common future. Philip is currently a geoscientist with Equinor in Norway and Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Some time back he graduated with a BSc in Geology at the University of Edinburgh and a PhD from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow on the topic of post-glacial tectonics and seismicity. www.poetpip.org

The Bubble Poet: Philip Ringrose Film-maker: Miriam Ringrose The Bubble is part of the ‘Earth from Outer space’ collection of poems and was inspired by the story of the collapse of Greek civilization in the setting of the rocks of the Acropolis in Athens and the magnificent Parthenon. The bubble analogy draws from the science of thin fluid membranes to capture the fragile yet inspirational nature of our modern human society. The filming was done on the shores of Trondheim Fjord in Norway.

-Brian Rosen

I am a research geologist and marine biologist. I live in Dulwich in South London. For most of my career, I have worked as a research scientist at the Natural History Museum in London, and have contributed to several major long-term exhibitions there. I am now retired, but continue with my research as a Scientific Associate in the Department of Earth Sciences. For my research I have concentrated on the geology and biology of living and fossil corals and reefs with subsidiary interests in biogeography and the history of science, with field work and other travel to numerous locations around the world including many tropical islands in Atlantic and Indopacific. Current projects include contributing to a guide to the geology of the Peak District, and the evolutionary and ecological history of living and fossil scleractinian corals and its implications for climate change. Other interests include architecture, choral singing, football, hill-walking, industrial history, landscape history, languages, natural history, photography, and railways ancient and modern. Favourite British landscapes include North Wales, Pennines and North Devon. My parents inspired my interest in poetry and writing, and the wider world of politics, education, countryside, sport and travel.

Ballads of Middleton Moor 2021, UK Poet: Brian Rosen Film-makers: Brian Rosen and George Darrell

-Rachel Tennant is a landscape architect, poet and photographer. Her profession has provided her with an experienced eye for the elements of landscape and design as well as an understanding of our interaction with the world whether natural or man-made world. Rachel’s writing, art and photography is heavily influenced by the external environment. She aims to distil a physical and emotional response to a location that captures and renders the ‘spirit of a place’. For her it is hard to separate the words and the image from the place and more increasingly her work has combined all these art forms together. Rachel’s work has been included in the Scottish Writers Centre 10 year anthology; Brushes with War pamphlet; Glasgow Review of Books; the Voluntary Arts Council publication My Time; part of a touring exhibition in the Screen Machine; The Quilter; the Glasgow Anthology Tip Tap Flat, Glasgow Women’s Poets anthology; Prole Magazine; Glasgow University’s Glasgow to Saturn; Evelyn Glennie’s website; and the Gladrag.

Orkney Stories 1-3 2020, UK Poet: Rachel Tennant I revisited the Orkney mainland in October 2020 after more than a ten-year absence. I was once again struck by the power and beauty of the landscape which is imbued with an incredible sense of history and time. It is palpable – from the ragged coastal cliffs pounded by a daily onslaught of the sea to soft rounded patchwork fields edged with neat, rounded Orkney stone walls and always the brooding shape of the high hills on Hoys as a backdrop – all washed by such a magical and clear light. Interwoven and intricately layered within the land is the story of its ancient self, its very creation and the waves of people who lived and interacted with the landscape leaving their own patina. The Orkney Series is a set of 9 video poetry pieces based on my reflections and the impact that island made on me following that visit. Brough of Birsay is a dramatic and beautiful island off Brough Head on the North West coast of the Mainland continually pummelled by the Atlantic. It has been inhabited since before the Picts and is only reached by a causeway at low tide. It is easy to imagine the sanctuary, for all its meanings and reasons, that the island bought to the waves of different settlers. Its Norse name, Byrgisey, means Fort Island. All that remains active is the lighthouse and the colonies of sea birds. Yet the layers of the lives of its previous inhabitants remain a strong presence which is essentially what this piece is about along with the drama of the island’s location.

Sarah Tremlett MPhil, FRSA, SWIP, Bristol Poetry Institute Partnerships Board Member is a poetry filmmaker, poet, artist, curator, theorist and author of The Poetics of Poetry Film (Intellect Books and The University of Chicago Press). Presenting her work worldwide, she is co-director of Liberated Words Poetry Film Events, and editor of Liberated Words online. Her project Tree is a geopoetic family history, poetry and poetry film journal across different periods and locations.www.sarahtremlett.com  www.liberatedwords.com

Firewash 2020, UK Poet: Sarah Tremlett Film-maker: Sarah Tremlett Firewash as both a poem and poetry film is a poetic apostrophe, centering on an intuitive response to an ancestor who mined at a site where there was manganese, in Cornwall in the 12th century. The poem first evolved whilst staying at the same location during a gale; and is taken from Tree a geopoetic family history and poetry film project, across different periods and locations.

Na H’In Ban

Long hours he would sit in his cell
with the wind howling around him
enclosed by the walls he had built
tapering into the centre
the only light from two slatted holes
beamed into his blank space
his calloused hands told him
how thick those walls were
but he preferred it here
to the company of the other monks.

He had left the old land and the fishing
to get away from the distractions of others
and here on this rocky outpost
of the white martyrdom
he would not be changing his ways now
he still fished and farmed in order to live
and he would pray and sing with the rest of them
but most of his time was spent here in solitude
contemplating life and death
or up there on the ridge
with the gulls wheeling and crying above him
peering over that sheer drop
at the big surf
that came crashing in from the west.

This is what he had come for
just to be here
alone on a rugged isle
to live under that wide open sky
to watch the stars at night
and wonder at their wanderings
to be with all of this
and of all of this
is what he had come for
to this spare isle of the sea.

-Norman Bissell
Slate, Sea And Sky

An island on the rim of the world
in that space between slate, sea and sky
where air and ocean currents
are plays of wild energy
and the light changes everything.

-Norman Bissell (https://www.normanbissell.com/poetry-2/)

The Elephant

If Africa is God’s garden,
then you, elephant,
are keeper of the garden,
with huge breath and vibrato voice,
you carve and detail
landscape’s highs and lows,
while Hong Kong artisans
carve your brothers’ poached tusks
into village scenes,
curving terraces crowded with people
arching silent into colorless heavens.

Keeper, your tusks, smoker’s white
and smooth as bannisters,
dig deep in savannah,
poking and uprooting trees
with an appetite that travels
to the horizon,
giving plain to where
lesser kudu can run,
and cheetah mark their prey.

Over your lifetime,
massive teeth rise six times
and never seem to tire
of chewing bark,
so seven generations of
wildebeest and giraffe
can graze and browse for tender shoots
instead of riffle through dust
to find your bones,
as the rich do through shop tables
to find your trinkets.

But to get them they have to
get you first,
so with those tusks
you tunnel through jungle
like a railroad company
does a stone mountain,
you charge through rain forest
like a bulldozer with a conscience,
leaving openings for forest buffalo
and gorilla to follow.

Your form, like a lighthouse,
adds brilliance
to the darkest of Africa,
letting in sun,
reflecting your ivory,
urging smaller plants
to thrive and open lushness
to those who can’t climb trees,
for without you,
just high branches could
push skyward,
reached only by monkeys, birds,
and the fair weather trade
of man’s scattered ambitions.

The clap of billiard balls
is no longer as deep
and full a sound as before,
but I’ve heard no one’s missed it.
And to tickle the ivories
was a fetish of piano players
when films were black and white.
Still, they’ve found ways to kill you
in greater numbers.

With the grandest of ringside seats
to spectacles of photographs,
books and zoos,
how is it we still
destroy you?

We carve dead idols
that neither see, nor hear,
nor speak, nor love,
nor keep,
for the circus of the self.
##

-Cynthia Gallaher

Ducks

Like “water off a duck’s back,”
farmers shrug natural ponds
and fill them with
more profitable holdings,
black rows and
two seasons of pesticide greenings.

Swamps, those notorious
hiding places of shackled fugitives,
and favored haunts of Cajun UFOs,
can’t seem to exorcize
builders who buy cheap
to clear reeds and cattails,
drain standing water
like a straw to the bottom
of dark cherry soda,
the good boy-scout work
of portfolio developers.

And ducks hover over one suspect watering hole
and to another urban swimming pool,
same as hummingbirds travel flower to flower,
while these journeys offer no nectar,
relief or room.

With the anxious return to ponds
they knew at mating time
a year before,
mallards make a descent
into scenes as crowded as
any city intersection,
hundreds of iridescent profiles
bob in the water,
the shoreline flutters in
wall-to-wall feathery bodies,
and seeing nowhere to land,
canvasbacks cut air
in crazy patterns
like distressed helicopters,
descending, hovering
and lifting up again confused,
from marsh to marsh,
from what was a swamp
to what never will be a swamp again.

And the pintail finds
hardly a place to lay her eggs
but in broad daylight,
where enemies crack shells,
breach generations.

Hunters relentlessly
search skies
once black with their wings,
and ducks relentlessly
search earth
once blue with their homes.
##

-Cynthia Gallaher

Apes

“They are not people,
but they are not animals either.”
~ Adriaan Kortlundt, Dutch biologist

Orangutan

Orangutan stubbornly refuses
to come down from his tree,
his arms crossed,
he won’t share exotic fruits
he plucks so easily,
only by force did he crawl
into the tightest corners of the earth,
Borneo, Sumatra,
where pouting and reclusive
mama o. makes her children
find their own trees.

Gorilla

Gorilla leads us to count
on fingers and toes all the ways
he’s closer to us
than to odd cousin orangutan,
how gorilla gave up tree houses,
to stand rooted on his own fuzzy-palm legs,
now plays with frogs, pets baby antelopes,
eats vegetarian,
sheds tears at injustice,
and while little ones continue games
of “tag” or “king of the hill,”
civilization closes in on
his misty jungles,
and in between shadows that shift
with foreigners and fallen trees
we hear gorillas’ heavy and emotional bodies
hitting ground like falling boulders.

Chimpanzee

Chimp points a stick at us,
narrowing in on the single chromosome
that prevents us from
embracing like brothers,
he, more distant
to gorilla and orangutan,
than to us.
Chimp, most likely candidate
for future conversations,
able to share,
or barter and trade
like a businessman,
sharpen and curve sticks into tools
to better dig out termites
for lunch,
study starry skies
like a fifteen-minute Galileo
before disappearing again
in the bush,
where he works out the strategy
of when ground is better,
and tree-bound’s best.

Us

Gorilla and chimp,
like us, too, carry that underside
to kill their own,
but their rapes and murders
are soft cracks of fragile twigs
compared with our loud chain-saw wails
wrecking toothed havoc
on whole forests.
Nearly five billion of us
crowding out the fraction of our cousins left,
old echoes of who we were
or might have been;
Nearly five billion
crawling into all corners of the earth,
claiming “this is mine,”
crossing our arms,
shrugging our shoulders,
stubborn as orangutans.
##

-Cynthia Gallaher

Northern Spotted Owl

The folks in Forks*
can’t figure out why one lousy bird
needs 2000 acres to stretch its wings,
when all they want
is a half-acre homestead,
steady logging work,
one stop light,
and a cup of hot coffee
from the Pay ‘n Serve Cafe
to fire their engines like
a hot chain saw every morning.

Fish and Wildlife
say the “owls vs. jobs” controversy
will be over
in a few years anyway,
won’t be any more trees
to fight over;
but to the youngest loggers,
a few years are an eternity,
enough time to get a car,
charm a good woman,
and gather lots of wooly layers
before shipping out to Alaska
for new riches underground.

Meanwhile in minutes,
500-year Douglas Firs fall and break
the pristine silence of sky
like glass shattering.
and in the time it takes you
to count growth rings
that date back before Columbus,
the spotted owl has flown
from one end of his night turf
to the other, surrounded by
clear-cut stubble,
perhaps a feather or two
falls on top
of his ancestors’ bones,
while white mans’ bones,
still alive in anxious flesh,
shakes inside the White House,
the closet of environmental presidents
who carry chain saws,
and more than one crooked finger
from the cabinet
points to Forks as evidence
that conservation exacts
too high a price on commerce.

And while board feet continue
to sail around the world
like crazy toothpicks,
the spotted owl sleeps on
in a standing dead tree hollow
he calls home,
hoping man makes himself
as scarce as Sasquatch.

*Forks, Washington: the self-proclaimed
“Logging Capital of the World.” Population: 2500.
##

-Cynthia Gallaher

Dolphins Among Tuna

It’s like digging through your handbag,
and tossing out dollars to find pennies,
how they draw purse-seine nets
to fishing boats,
heave-ho breathless dolphins
to sharks by thousands,
or let them slip
through the grinder
along with tuna.

Cetacean magnificence,
along with other highly-evolved mysteries,
don’t generate money
for the fishing industry,
the curved, firm, echolocating bodies
are necessary nuisances,
as not-so-bright tuna
follow beneath to new feeding grounds,
taking more than a team of potential sashimi
to ever find,
while man follows doggedly above,
dolphin leading by the nose
to new payloads of yellowfin.

Reluctant guides of a double hunt,
spotted dolphin can’t shake their shadows
closing in with silvery horror,
with macabre macramé
of transparent motive,
these who slice through man’s
grammar and syntax
as easily as their lithe fins
cut waves,
their social smiles
ever permanent, sincere,
they don’t discriminate
when saving the overboard sailor,
pushing her to the surface.

Caught between the devil
and demand for chunk light,
dolphins are down
for the microfilament count,
drowned by intellect before profit,
and perhaps, if we bite
into the right lettuce-ruffled sandwich,
we might finally wise up,
as some of our
best thinkers on earth
remain
conveniently packed
in spring water.
##

-Cynthia Gallaher (All poems above from her collection: Earth Elegance. The book was published by March Abrazo Press in Chicago.)

Bios and Links

-Chris Murray
Chris Murray is a poet and essayist. Her most recent book Gold Friend was published in 2020 by Turas Press, Dublin. Chris is working on her sixth book and loves the work that goes into making books. Chris founded ‘Poethead’ a site dedicated to platforming work by women poets, their translators, and editors. A member of Fired! Irish Women Poets and the Canon, she archives objects related to the canonical neglect of women poets at RASCAL, Queen’s University, Belfast.

Chris Murray

https://timberjournal.org/archive/seed

–Cynthia Gallaher,

a Chicago USA-based poet, is author of four poetry collections, including Epicurean Ecstasy: More Poems About Food, Drink, Herbs and Spices, three chapbooks, including Drenched, and the nonfiction Frugal Poets’ Guide to Life: How to Live a Poetic Life, Even If You Aren’t a Poet.

The Great Big Green Week – Day Four

The Zone

-Billy Mills

Sustainable Poetry

Everything is connected to everything else.

A bald statement to begin: most contemporary poetry is predicated on a set of unsustainable anthropocentric views of the nature of the world. That the world exists to serve as a stage set for the enactment of human dramas. That it reflects the moods of, or evoked by, the poet. That it exists only when observed. That it exists only when written.

These attitudes are, in English-language verse, at least as old as Spenser, but have enjoyed a massive resurgence thanks to postmodernist views of language as game. Interestingly both ‘mainstream’ and ‘avant-garde’ poetries tend to find common ground in this drive to subjugate the world as written to human needs and ends. The pathetic fallacy meets literary theory and nobody wins.

Other current cultural trends, ranging from hippy-dippy animism to the pursuit of the technological fix for everything, reinforce this view of the world as being understandable only in purely human terms. We make nature in our own image, one way or another.

The physical sciences take a different view: that the world is essentially physical, and that languages, including mathematics, are tools we can use to create increasingly accurate maps of it. Unfortunately, in populist attempts to explain their theories and concepts, even scientists can slip into animistic and/or idealistic confusion when they present objects and forces as if they were possessed of wishes, desires, needs and other human motivations, or speak of them as if they were created, rather than described, by mathematics or verbal language.

One form of this mistaken ‘scientific’ idealism that is regularly cited by modern supporters of the esse est percipi principle is the whole field of quantum physics. Idealists assume that the principle of indeterminacy supports the idea that the world is produced by the process of observation, and this is frequently compared to strands of oriental philosophy that hold to similar ideas. In fact, however, it would appear that quantum physicists themselves believe that the particles they study are real things with real existence. They just do not fully understand the ways in which these particles behave, and it may well be that new sets of scientific laws that describe nano-objects may yet evolve, quite different from those that describe the macro-level world. In any case, even if observation influences behaviour on the nano-scale, is anyone seriously arguing that telescopes influence the behaviour of the stars?

As poetry becomes increasingly professionalised, the pressure is on the qualified poet (MA in Creative Writing, PhD in Colonial Studies) to be able to draw on, and contribute to, a body of theory that lends academic respectability to their work. It is understandable that these professionals of language will be drawn towards those theories that foreground the importance of their chosen medium. By so doing, they contribute in some small way to the elevation of the human over the rest of the world. This, in turn, serves to aggravate, again in small ways, the ongoing environmental crisis that threatens to hasten the extinction of the species they elevate. In small ways, but even small actions have results. The person who writes poems also drinks increasingly impure water from the tap and selects over-packaged food from the supermarket shelf. Everything is connected to everything else: the first law of ecology.

Nothing ever goes away

Esse non est percipi. We live on a planet that is a small ball turning round a reasonably ordinary star, itself located in the outer reaches of a galaxy that is, in turn, just one of billions or possibly hundreds of billions. We share this world with about 1,000,000 named species, of which about 800,000 are animals. Of the animals, around 600,000 species are insects, and among these there are approximately 350,000 species of beetle. In the face of these numbers, a little humility is in order. While it may be consoling to believe that humans are the crown of creation and generate reality by means of consciousness and perception, the evidence tends not to support this position.

Ironically, the space in which postmodernist idealism has developed is created by the application to wealth-production of those very scientific advances that render idealism untenable in the first place. To quote Joseph Schwartz, from his book The Creative Moment (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1992): ‘One of the things that the physics of the nineteenth century makes inescapable is that the physical universe has structures that exist whether we are here to see them or not. We are too far down the road of industrial development to return to the dinner party idealism of Bishop Berkeley and his descendants and their fabulous theories of the world as mind and mind alone. Indeed this view has not been treated with the ridicule it deserves.’

Sustainable poetry finds its ground in the imperfect charting of these structures. It also illuminates the deep ecology view that we need to adopt an ecocentric mode of living in the world if we are to survive. If the role of philosophy is to inspire action, the role of poetry is to be in the world. Like the laws of physics, like mathematics, this poetry is descriptive, not proscriptive. It also accepts the sceptical view that full knowledge of the world cannot be attained through the medium of the senses. However, it sees this as a failure of the senses, not as an argument for the idealist position, and works towards the clearest possible approximation. Rather than saying that nothing is unless it is held in the mind of a human observer, it asserts that many things are that have never been perceived, and that for most things that are perceived, the perception is imperfect. This is a necessary part of the humility called for earlier. We are part of the weave of things, and our view inevitably depends on where we sit in that weave. That’s all. Everything goes somewhere.

There is no such thing as a free lunch

Cothu, the business council for the arts in Ireland, used to run courses in management, marketing and communications. It then changed its name to Business2Arts, and sent round a letter stating that its new aim was to convince business that an investment in the arts was sound, particularly because the arts could help improve corporate communications.
Small press poetry publishers applying to the Arts Council of Ireland are sent a form in which they are required to give details of their mission statement and actual or potential job creation status. This reflects the council’s role as a government-financed development agency, whose primary function is to fund and oversee the professionalisation of arts administration. Under this regime, the arts become part of the states economic development strategy. Music and literature are used in tourist promotion; arts in the community schemes help reduce the long-term unemployed numbers. The saleable is valued above all else.

However, there is no such thing as sustainable growth. We live on a finite planet, with finite resources available, and at some point growth will tip us over the edge. The arts are not immune to this fact.

Sustainable poetry is not a career move. As already noted, it is difficult for those poets who live and work within the confines of the literary and/or teaching professions, who have to some extent been colonised by the machine, to do work that questions the status quo. Consequently, it is likely that any attempt at a sustainable poetry will come from apparently marginal writers.

Another, perhaps more self-evident, aspect of sustainability has to do with the means of production and dissemination of the work. Sustainable poetry does not compete with more mainstream publishing houses for a slice of some illusory ‘market’. Why publish 500 copies if you know you’ll only sell 50? Why not barter? Keep the environmental impact to a minimum. Beware the technological ‘fix’ of e-publishing.

Even small actions have results. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Nature knows best

So what might a sustainable poetry look like? I would like to present here a brief glimpse of some contemporary writing that represents a beginning.

For instance, the phenomenological poetry that Geoffrey Squires has been producing in recent years illustrates one way of writing about how we perceive the world. Here’s a short extract from his Untitled II as printed in Shearsman 50:

Slope of sound down where it comes from
last small effect

has no need of is not part of unaffected by
the mind is full of assertion and denial

and no impediment or obstacle nothing it seems in the way
but to listen for hear the right thing
that we so that we

quick it is quick rapid extraordinarily so

and overlapping not separate or distinct
laid down one upon another one after another
how they appear to us how they are remembered

Squires’ work manages to explore the relationship between mind and world without overvaluing the one or undervaluing the other. It is a poetry of experience and consequence, the experience of being in the world in which ‘there is not one moment but that something happens’ and the consequence of mind’s attempts at processing that experience in light of the perception that ‘recognition is not knowledge’. The experience is of a world that:

maintains maintains itself
has no need of is not part of
and overlapping not separate or distinct

Richard Caddel’s Fantasia in the English Choral Tradition, recently reprinted in Magpie Words (West House Books, 2002) opens with the following lines:

signals:
pact or parts
corresponding
in January
bonfires smoke
down the river bank
a way off —

moving (lunchtime)
out of the realm of
false, muddled argument
into that contact
with the world in which
(for which)
I live —
to point towards —
because there is no ‘away’
to sling things to
and to live here
is not to escape

you feel the heat
centres of learning
everything
tumbling
and still
that ‘human record’
how many million years
complete.

in which the movement of verse and mind reflect exactly that being in the world to which sustainable poetry must aspire. In fact, the best of Caddel’s work reaches this place as a matter of course, and then sings. Which is not to say that it discounts the human. Such primal experiences as love and death and the other ‘great themes’ are here, but always set in the context of ‘the world in which / (for which)’ we all live. This adds depth to the handling of the personal, resulting in poems that are both deeply moving and deeply grounded in the actual world.

flag-
stone rocking on unstable
base, the rain

gone under it,
sunken puddle. A speech
at odds with itself, as

likely to
soak you as save you.
Ann’s voice

clear out of the kitchen I must
be going no
longer staying — shapes

that delight
and try us.

(from Rigmarole: Uncertain time)

Caddel’s work is full of people, but they do not dominate the world, they inhabit it: placed in the weave of things. Shorn of the (pseudo) religiosity of a Snyder or a Hughes, this is ecocentric poetry in action.

Maurice Scully’s deep understanding of Irish poetry informs his own practice as a writer. Unlike the English pastoral tradition, which, as I have argued elsewhere, is essentially a poetry of empire, of the land as owned object, this tradition is one of the land as living world. From the 8th century haiku-like lyrics of intense perception to the onomastics of the Metrical Dindshenchus, medieval Irish nature poetry concerned itself with the stubborn actuality of things and of the odd relationship between those things and the words used to name them. These lines from Scully’s 5 Freedoms of Movement (Etruscan Books, 2002, originally Galloping Dog 1987) illustrate the point I am trying to make:

persistent undersound of a river. hardness.
table facing a square window inset in a deep white wall.
the four places. & more. the head of a narrow angular stairs.
sometimes an animal passes. brown white black.
a fly sometimes in the sunlight.
sometimes a man.

When Scully writes like this, the most fruitful comparison available is with the earliest Irish lyrics. The sheer concreteness of the writing mirrors the desire to present what is with minimal interference from the vanity of the writing ego. The world is not presented as a stage set for the acting out of some human drama but as a complex system of which the human domain is just one part. Or, to quote again

a large brain & a long childhood
leaves branches water (where was I?)
with all the ornate figurations in meta- this & that
(branches) climbing while the truth dwindling in proportion
to the glare of the accentuated frill will. well.
many mouths moving. no wonder nobody with any sense.

Wary of theory, this is a poetry of learning to live with and in the world, not of explaining and improving on it.

*

What these three very different poets have in common is a respect for the world in which they live and a balanced view of the role of perception, and of poetry, as mapper rather than maker. It is this that marks out their poetry as sustainable in the sense I have been using the term. Small actions can lead to big results. If poets fail to look to the possible consequences of the way they present the world, they run the risk of being complicit in ecological meltdown. If we write as if the non-human exists to serve as a rich source of metaphor, we mirror the attitudes of those who exploit more tangible and financially rewarding resources. If we see poetry as a career opportunity, or as part of ‘the market’, we enter into the world of unsustainable growth. If we insist that our limited understanding forms a basis for improving on billions of years of evolution, we are likely to destroy the infinitely complex systems that sustain life. Nature knows best.

If, on the other hand, poetic practice (given that poetic theory is pretty well irrelevant to the creation of good writing) comes to terms with the laws of ecology that serve as section headers in this essay, there is some small hope that our tiny input may help move the intellectual climate toward a position of respect for the world on which our survival depends. Everything is connected to everything else. Nothing ever goes away. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Nature knows best.

-Billy Mills

Bios And Links

-Billy Mills

Born Dublin 1954. Has lived and worked in Spain and the UK.  Now living in Limerick. Founder and co-editor (with Catherine Walsh) of hardPressed Poetry and the Journal.

Books include Lares/Manes: Collected Poems (Shearsman, 2009), Imaginary Gardens (hardPressed poetry 2012), Loop Walks (with David Bremner, hardPressed poetry 2013), from Pensato (Smithereens Press e-book, 2013) and The City Itself (Hesterglock, 2017).

–Caleb Parkin 

is a day-glo queero techno eco poet, tutor & facilitator – and Bristol City Poet, 2020 – 22. He’s published widely in journals including The Rialto, The Poetry Review and Magma – and won or shortlisted in major competitions, including second prize in the National Poetry Competition 2016. He tutors for Poetry Society, Poetry School and Cheltenham Festivals, and holds an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes (CWTP). He previously worked in BBC TV and Radio production and as a Senior Inclusion Worker. His debut pamphlet, Wasted Rainbow, was published with tall-lighthouse in February and This Fruiting Body is his debut collection out in October.

This poem is from Caleb’s upcoming collection ‘This Fruiting Body’ with Nine Arches Press, published October 14th 2021.

–Marius Grose 

began his career in television post-production in 1983. He worked as a tape operator and assistant editor in Bristol and London for the BBC and ITV networks. Marius has cut programmes for all the major broadcasters in the UK as well USA companies such as National Geographic and Discovery. He has worked on programmes that range from wildlife documentaries, factual entertainment shows, current affairs such as Channel 4’s Dispatches, and feature films. In 2002 Marius was nominated for the Royal Television Society’s feature picture editor of the year award in recognition of his creative storytelling.

Great Big Green Week Day Three

Kids’ Climate March

The kids didn’t go to school on Friday.
They all skived off in their thousands,
played Tory truant with Andrea Leadsom’s inbox,
swaggered, like silly socialist sausages,
past Katie Hopkins’ newsstand.

When we heard what they were doing,
we peered out of our office windows,
hands full of plastic packaging
and toxic toner cartridges.

The kids failed to listen to our elected representatives,
who warned of wasting precious time,
and the danger of disrupting schedules,
as they kept busy with their efficient,
swift and productive Brexit negotiations.

Instead, the kids persisted with their silly snowflake dreams,
went AWOL during English Lit and Art
to paint pithy, poignant, political placards,
bunked off Maths, Geography, Geology, Biology
to read educated articles on climate science,
biodiversity, extinction and statistics.

They ghosted Sociology, RE and languages
to meet together in socially conscious,
multi-faith, bilingual community groups,
missing out on Media Studies
to take part in panel discussion shows on the BBC
and launch powerful social media campaigns.

Then, by mid-afternoon, when they should have been
running in slow motion round the tennis court,
they could be seen marching miles through city streets,
with rosy cheeks and blazing eyes.

Simon Abbot, aged 15,
missed Chemistry and Human Reproduction
to hold Isla Finch’s hand
outside the Bristol council offices.
When she told him she was scared
about all the forest fires and insects dying,
he drew a ladybird on her hand and kissed it.

Yes, we will all remember the day the kids went on strike,
while our leaders scoffed and sneered at them
from inside their Twitter feeds,
trying to squash their heads between their fingers,

all those ignorant, naïve,
selfish, planet-obsessed children,
playing hooky in History lessons
to save their own future.

-Liv Torc www.livtorc.co.uk from her new book, The Human Emergency (2021)

Caleb Parkin

 link to some of his poems published online, then here are a selection:

 – ‘Ecco the Dolphin’ on Ink, Sweat and Tears:

https://www.google.com/url?q=https://inksweatandtears.co.uk/caleb-parkin

He says “Interested in the construction of ‘Nature’ in culture here, in a computer game in this instance.”

 – ‘Please Do Not Touch the Walrus or Sit on the Iceberg’, on And Other Poems:

 

https://andotherpoems.com/2021/01/16/please-do-not-touch-the-walrus-or-sit-on-the-iceberg-by-caleb-parkin/

 

He says “I’m evolving the genre of ‘Ecophrastic’ poetry, inspired by natural history collections…Another such poem inspired by the Horniman opens the collection, but there are other museum poems dotted through.”

 – ‘Ode on a Black Plastic Compost Bin’ on Atrium:

 

https://atriumpoetry.com/2021/02/09/ode-on-a-black-plastic-compost-bin-caleb-parkin/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

He says “Can ecopoetry be ecstatic, as well as mournful?”

 – ‘If the Earth is My Mother’ – a video, sample poem promo:

https://youtu.be/VbvSM5hjNNQ

He says of this : “Interested here in unpacking the gendered idea of ‘Mother Earth’ and making it very personal for me – and, I hope, the reader/listener.”

His book’s pre-order site :

https://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/this-fruiting-body.html

 

The Malnourished

Drought
Can drive anyone
To desperation, and

Sweat
And toil are
Known thieves of time.

Then, while greed
Eats the garden you grew
For your family,

Little
Is left
For nourishment.

But don’t we
All have plenty of
Plastic silverware?
-Samantha Terrell (Previously published in the Poets’ Choice Global Warming Issue)

Bios And Links

-Liv Torc

is a poet, artist and ideas weaver who plunders the vast caverns and dormant volcanoes of the human and planetary condition. A Radio 4 Slam winner, a former Bard of Exeter, host of The Rainbow Fish Speakeasy and of The Hip Yak Poetry Shack. Liv runs the poetry stage at WOMAD, the Hip Yak Poetry School and the lockdown haiku and photography project, Haiflu – as featured on the BBC’s Radio 4 Today Programme. 

In 2019 her climate change in the face of motherhood poem The Human Emergency went viral and she performed at Glastonbury Festival and represented Somerset for the BBC’s National Poetry Day celebrations. In 2020 she was chosen as one of four Siren Poets by Cape Farewell for a commission on climate change in the time of COVID and for the BBC’s Make a Difference campaign.

Her books include Show Me Life (2015) and The Human Emergency (2021)

Find out more www.livtorc.co.uk

-Caleb Parkin

is a day-glo queero techno eco poet & facilitator, based in Bristol. His debut pamphlet, Wasted Rainbow, is published by tall-lighthouse in February 2021 (launching on Saturday 13th). His debut collection, This Fruiting Body, will be published by Nine Arches in October 2021. From 2020 – 22, he’s Bristol City Poet.

Tweet: @CalebParkin | Insta: @couldbethemoon | Website: www.couldbethemoon.co.uk

The Great Big Green Week Day Two

Enclosure

Looking out, staring faces
Instagramming destruction
captivity’s audience, agast:

we’re animals, trapped
outside a burning forest,
water rising: species floundering,
engendered everything, is lost.

Every cliché force-fed
believed; ignorant genus
perfect square moments
self-recorded, elapsing
taxonomic downfall:

keep feeding, retaking
ultimate faking

minds blurring, words extinct

burrowing time,
brains full of sand.

Dystopian extinction
enslavement perpetual,
memory’s faulted, abstains;

I cannot remember
better day out
yet wait…
perfect horror;
who’s trapped in this cage?

Indistinct animal
staring at victims
behold selfish need
own one, hashtag shot.

Whilst behind huddled mass
burning, unhindered
this problem
themselves
unfollowed, forgot.

-Sarah Reeson

Sky Spinners

You’re a whizzer,
a woosher,
a sonic swoosher,
an air slicer,
a low-flying bird dicer,
an H2O ricer.

You’re a ghostly, three-armed angel
standing at the gateway to the cloud kingdom.
You’re waving, we’re drowning.
You’re a trio of eyebrows – all frowning.

You’re a kinetic, kite-sifting light,
a robot soldier in the sustainability fight.
You’re a thin man with a fat plan,
a small plug in a big dam.
You’re a vibrating, vertical battering ram.

Armed, farmed and sometimes alarmed,
you’re a three-headed snake, already charmed.
You’re a flower power tower,
an eco wower,
weaving electricity streamers
for ideological dreamers.

You’re a ghost ship made of air,
a beleaguered beacon of NIMBY despair,
a dangerous place for drying underwear.
You’re proof we care.
You’re propellers without planes,
the champions of change,
both comforting and strange,
moving with magnetic grace
across the Earth’s frenetic face.

You’re a semaphore warning, seen from space,

sent to save the human race,
like a match is sent to save the dark.

You’re hope’s art,

an apple put back in an empty apple cart,
a sail on the all new Noah’s Ark,
a piece of Sellotape on a world
torn clean apart.

You stop my heart.
You start my heart.
You stop my heart.
You start my heart.

You’re clock hands on a ticking planet.

SOGGY TWAT

The breakdown man said
he had to pull a £50k Mercedes
out of the flood yesterday.
They just drive into it ,
expecting it to part like the Red Sea,
Bluetooth glinting off the storm surge,
King Canute in cufflinks,
an entitled Icarus with waxed wing mirrors,
scoffing at the locusts in Africa,
the burning bush kangaroos in Australia,
as if nature was something
that happened to other people,
the UK now a polluted pond of bewilderment,
full of fat frogs who should have seen it coming.

I don’t like to tell people bad news,
but his car was a write-off, he said.
Grim satisfaction and compassion
warred with his top lip.

He had just loaded my Clio
onto the back of his van.
My wipers scraped across the screen,
like petrified eyebrows.
They just gave up in the storm,
dragging their heels across my vision,
until everything was spots
and streams and frothing glass,

like the future was not worth seeing.

I sat up front and stared out the window.
He had jazz on low.
Water pooled excitedly along the roadside,
a billion expectant royalists
waiting for the Queen’s tsunami,
a torrential ticker tape parade.

He wanted me to hook him up,
tow him back to the garage, he said,
but the water was over his bonnet
and I’m only on minimum wage.
I’m not getting up to my knackers in that,
just because this guy’s a…

He didn’t say twat –¬¬¬
he was too professional –¬¬¬
but we both thought it.

I imagined the three-pointed star
on the nose of his car
winking like a 50p in a puddle,
an emblem which once stood for
world domination,
no better than the flag on the Titanic.
It’s not going to be peaceful rebellion, is it?
We aren’t going to fade into the end of days,
but sink into soggy despair.
A perpetual camping holiday from the 1980s,
forever trying to do a three-point turn
in a cul-de-sac with a trailer tent
in the rain.

Miserable, wet, eating cold tomato soup
around burning oil cans.
Relying on the kindness of neighbours
and the Green Flag man,
who earns less in a year
than Mr. Mercedes earns in a month.

It’s the people on the ground in the waders
who are going to have to save us,
over and over and over again.

His engine must have flooded –¬¬¬
the electric’s poached,
the brown water lapping
the cream leather interior,
reclaiming the carcass of consumerism.

I am still a God, he thought,
as he sat waist deep in cow diarrhoea.

-Liv Torc

Bios And Links

-Liv Torc

is a poet, artist and ideas weaver who plunders the vast caverns and dormant volcanoes of the human and planetary condition. A Radio 4 Slam winner, a former Bard of Exeter, host of The Rainbow Fish Speakeasy and of The Hip Yak Poetry Shack. Liv runs the poetry stage at WOMAD, the Hip Yak Poetry School and the lockdown haiku and photography project, Haiflu – as featured on the BBC’s Radio 4 Today Programme. 

In 2019 her climate change in the face of motherhood poem The Human Emergency went viral and she performed at Glastonbury Festival and represented Somerset for the BBC’s National Poetry Day celebrations. In 2020 she was chosen as one of four Siren Poets by Cape Farewell for a commission on climate change in the time of COVID and for the BBC’s Make a Difference campaign.

Her books include Show Me Life (2015) and The Human Emergency (2021)

Find out more www.livtorc.co.uk

-S Reeson

[she/they] is 54, bisexual and married with two children: they have suffered anxiety for all of their life, and started telling stories as a ten-year-old in order to help them cope. Now, they write and record poetry, short stories and episodic fiction, whilst dissecting their unique creative process using both video and audio as the means to continue coping.

A considerable lived experience of mental health issues, a passion for niche arts and media and an undimmed enthusiasm for environmentalism combine, to allow creativity to emerge, and new stories and projects to be created. They love to experiment and push creative boundaries, and gain a huge amount of motivation and inspiration from talking about both the journey and continued evolution as a creative.

After winning a Poetry Society members’ contest (and reading that piece at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden) they attended the inaugural Mslexicon in 2019, chosen as their first ever participative literary event. In that same year they wrote 24 poems about their home town for the Places of Poetry online initiative, one of which is included in the official anthology published for National Poetry Day in October 2020 and subsequently reproduced by the Sunday Telegraph.

Their work has appeared in the Flights / Quarterly ejournal, Green Ink Poetry and has been published by Black Bough Poetry, and they are a regular participant in an increasing number of Zoom Open Mics, including the monthly event at Wordsworth Grasmere. They have self-published their own poetry chapbook, and have read poetry at the Essex Book Festival.

Ice Age Europe Day

-Matthew M. C. Smith

Great Big Green Week Day One.

For the nature poets

Globe-scattered stars,
un-met in the most part.
Yet word-chimes harmonise,
gentle laments synchronise.

Soft songs of earth-angels
eddy together,
a river of elegy sighs.

Bards weep beside
once-sweet streams,
Lost crystal lakes of old tales
In their lines and dreams.

-Polly Oliver

Urban Shade (“Amazon rainforest now emitting more CO2 than it absorbs” – The Guardian)

Under heat-weighted trees I try to remember how to breathe.
Lungfuls seem thin, un-nourishing. (Anxiety, I chide myself doubtfully.)

Sweat trickles tickle like fly legs.
Weary chipping of dusty sparrows
dulled by engines.

Gasping leaves barely shift, drop dryly to asphalt.
Sap retreats inwards to ride out crisis.

Searing sky the eye of God –
Scorching glare on desert
outside Eden.

-Polly Oliver

Disintegrated Seasons (Haiku)

Butterfly beating
a frantic path through raindrops –
climate out of joint.

-Polly Oliver

Apocalypse Prayer

How close to chaos
heartbeat;
hand’s bark coarseness
embrace permanence,
sky-touched guardian.
Guide me, Gaia,
green palmed destiny
do not troll, be kind,
define yourself; reborn
phalanges branch
broken promises forgive
replanting billion boughs,
stubborn minds must grow.
Lift up life’s mossy plane;
lux perpetua no longer,
curvature in darkness, burns
ungoverned villainy
wrecks blessed mounds
once all revered
now farmed, destroyed,
unchecked.
Help us evolve; past helpless
greedy children’s needs,
ascendency beyond
their selfish greed
meat challenges, surmount
rich grain sown better, life
redefined all better
within your Mother’s love
forgive their arrogance
before we
are
too late.

-Sarah Reeson

Bios And Links

-Polly Oliver
is a Broadcast Journalist and Communications freelancer. Polly has featured work in publications by Black Bough Poetry, The Wombwell Rainbow, The Tide Rises, Falls and Spillwords. She is Pushcart prize nominated and was Poet of the Month and runner up for Publication of the Year on Spillwords.

-S Reeson

[she/they] is 54, bisexual and married with two children: they have suffered anxiety for all of their life, and started telling stories as a ten-year-old in order to help them cope. Now, they write and record poetry, short stories and episodic fiction, whilst dissecting their unique creative process using both video and audio as the means to continue coping.

A considerable lived experience of mental health issues, a passion for niche arts and media and an undimmed enthusiasm for environmentalism combine, to allow creativity to emerge, and new stories and projects to be created. They love to experiment and push creative boundaries, and gain a huge amount of motivation and inspiration from talking about both the journey and continued evolution as a creative.

After winning a Poetry Society members’ contest (and reading that piece at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden) they attended the inaugural Mslexicon in 2019, chosen as their first ever participative literary event. In that same year they wrote 24 poems about their home town for the Places of Poetry online initiative, one of which is included in the official anthology published for National Poetry Day in October 2020 and subsequently reproduced by the Sunday Telegraph.

Their work has appeared in the Flights / Quarterly ejournal, Green Ink Poetry and has been published by Black Bough Poetry, and they are a regular participant in an increasing number of Zoom Open Mics, including the monthly event at Wordsworth Grasmere. They have self-published their own poetry chapbook, and have read poetry at the Essex Book Festival.

The theme for World Alzheimer’s Month in 2021 is ‘Know dementia, know Alzheimer’s’.

Swan Lake Memories

There were seven swans
on the lake that day.
One, head down, tail up,
feeding in the mud
while we, your hand slipped
into mine, laughed
at the thought that it was mooning
us. Cygnets,
grey-brown balls of fluff,
resting on their mother’s back.
A first-time kiss and other thoughts
of future broods.

Sitting in this comfy chair
I see, in not quite real-life,
the white birds, now what are they?
A thing inside is nagging me
and, clear as day, I see a girl
giggling at an upturned bird,
and hear the sounds
and smell the Spring.
She looks a little like
the woman who looks after me,
makes drinks
and gives me pills to take.

She comes in with a mug of tea
and I gesture wordlessly
towards the screen and she
says Swans. I sigh, of course,
I should have known.
They’re important! I reply
and a small smile flits across her face.
Yes, they are and she looks sad
but another word is better;
melon?, melony?
It shows the birds are flying now,
I don’t know where, oh
those white birds, what are they?

-Tim Fellows December 31st 2019

Mancunian Insomnia 

when you bond

with the alien

that invaded your beloved’s body

become more maternal

than you could be with your

daughters

who seek comfort in the

luxury of expensive puddings

nocturnal snacks

when you fret

that he’ll feel abandoned

alone

this cocooned clone

that stole the eyes

and ate the mind

of the one

whose name we still use

to delude ourselves

when you

trace circles

round the still sturdy heart

hoping for a glimmer

of recognition

-Spangle McQueen (First published by Burning House Press https://burninghousepress.com/2018/05/25/mancunian-insomnia-by-spangle-mcqueen/

What do I Do Now?

She looked up at me innocently, her soft blue eyes with their flecks of grey widening like a small child’s. She looked so mystified and innocent that I could hardly bear it.

‘One, two, three, seventeen, twenty-four, five.. Why am I counting?’ Sometimes she was aware she had just been acting strangely, almost like someone else commenting upon the antics of a stranger.

As the disease progressed my Mother changed mood frequently, sliding in and out of tune with her ‘self’ just like one of those old fashioned radios that require fine tuning to locate the correct frequency.

Shades of the woman I knew so well were still in evidence but now a new persona was emerging. If I felt frightened by her diagnosis I cannot imagine the extent of her terror.

‘Oh it is so nice to see you!’ Betty would say every now and again when her illness gave her a well earned rest. On really good days she would say my name and that felt like winning the lottery.

I first noticed that something was very wrong when she would repeat what she had just said about twenty times over the phone. I didn’t immediately understand this was an early sign of dementia. I naively assumed that memory loss was a natural sign of old age since she was in her eighties.

Over time she stopped doing things she enjoyed. She downed her needles decisively one day, announcing that knitting gave her a headache. She did the same with watching TV and listening to the radio. We later discovered she had had TIAs during these activities but believed they had caused her to feel unwell and decided that ceasing them would protect her from illness. An increasing lack of mental and physical stimulation only exacerbated the problem and a downward spiral ensued.

You learn a lot about your own strengths and weaknesses when you care for someone with Alzheimer’s full time. Sometimes I wouldn’t manage to shower until midday. It reminded me of how life was when our children were small.. the copious cold cups of tea, barely eaten meals and lack of sleep.

The responsibility was daunting and I can honestly say looking after my Mother is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The experience was extremely challenging and stressful but also very humbling.

When someone you love descends into this often frightening and isolating journey it rips your world apart. The sufferer may be completely unintelligible, seem bewildered and frustrated but then out of the blue appear totally present, saying something reassuring and familiar.

My life was saved by music and poetry. By chance I discovered that the repetition of melody and rhyme possessed magical properties. Betty couldn’t remember what she had said five minutes previously but if you read the first line of a familiar poem she could recite the rest!

Poetry saved my sanity and brought me closer to my mom, who always loved it and could still recite many poems she had always loved.. and this revealed to me the miracle of poetry.

-Diane Rossi

The Unresolveables (An Heroic Crown Sonnet)

1. Sat At Tideline With
Sat at tideline with all my belongings.
Longings in belongings. No you can’t. Don’t
Wave waxing pulls my stuff, drags it. Slipping.
It can’t have it. I won’t give in. I won’t

Ripple recedes as it pulls away from me.
Then it rises, swoops like bloody murder.
Sucks at my frames, pictures of family.
Don’t remember what I’ve lost. I suffer

from losing nothing. People tell me what
I’ve lost. I’m none the wiser. I need my bag.
They steal my bag. Then help me find it. That’s
why I carry it with me. My keys they rag.

They lift up stuff, say It’s here. Discovered
My photos, my ornaments, all gathered.

2. All Gathered

My photos, my ornaments, all gathered
into me beside a sea that steals, hoards.
I painted three cat pictures. I’m mithered,
I can’t recall their names. Lose the cord.

Hoppy had only three legs. Long haired love.
In life you collect things for a reason,
then forget the reason. Heaven’s above.
I need to write stuff down. Where’s my pen gone?

My pen is in my bag. Someone’s stolen
my bag. “Let me help you look.” Says carer.
In my pile of valuables, well hidden.
What do I need my pen for? Waves closer.

We are steadfast and keen in preserving
against receding waves that keep pulling.

3. Against

against receding waves that keep pulling.
Everyday is new to me. Folk tell
me something new everyday. I’m mulling
over I belong here, here is not hell.

I have a husband who makes the tea, there
behind the counter. Folk confuse me when
they say so sorry but they need to share,
my husband is dead. They don’t make sense.

Show photos of me with a strange cute man.
I nod sweetly. Hold hands. They’re clearly mad.
Steven, my husband, bring us tea, kind and
sensitive. He goes along with their sad

news. Waves pull all value I have hoarded
all away from me, memories tethered.

4. All Away

All away from me, memories tethered
by fragility. Lacks strength of spider’s
web, or ship’s anchor rope. Stranger blethered
I have two sons. One no longer with us.

Competitive. Aspired. One capricious.
Dead. Blue and white rope he used. My son, Brave.
Bravest he ever was. Wouldn’t let us
hug him. Let me put my hands on his brave

shoulders. Then he pushed away. As if to
say I’m strong enough to stand on my own.
Isn’t that brave? You know he had blue
and white rope round his neck. He was known

as brilliant yachtsman. Memories slipped
by my frantic grasp to prevent their drift.

5. Frantic Grasp

By my frantic grasp to prevent their drift
I try to keep all safe. I have sons. O,
how wonderful! These are them, are they? Sift
through the photos. They’re cute.
You have to go?

Please hold my hand just a little longer.
Thankyou. I won beauty contests. Youthful.
I sold microwaves to throngs as youngster.
Managed teams, won prizes. Being truthful.

Do you like my hat? It’s a summer one.
Please stay a bit longer. Don’t like it here.
No, really. I don’t. Lonely when you’ve gone.
Go then. See if I care. Don’t leave me dear.

Someone visited me? Photos. My minds
into forgottenness. They are reminders.

6. They Are

into forgottenness. They are reminders.
Photos remember what is forgotten.
Who are these people? I wake from slumber
to strangers smiling back at me. Fiction.

They mean nothing to me. Why are they framed,
and in my room? These clothes aren’t mine. Someone’s
swapped them! Mine had sewn cotton labels, named.
I’m sure they did. In here they are all cons.

Come into my room in waves, steal what can.
I know what they’re about. Won’t fool me blind.
What do you mean what am I doing? Man,
this is my room. It isn’t? Please help me find

my room. At seas edge I can feel waves lift.
How did I find myself here, a spindrift?

7. I Find Myself

How did I find myself here, a spindrift?
Not enough tea in this. It’s just water.
Sugar. Can you put more sugar in it?
What’s your name? Thankyou. That tastes much better.

I need the loo. Can you help me? Always
somebody screams in here. You like my hat?.
I need the loo. Where you going? Away?
O, I know her she’s nice. Yes, love. Toilet.

She’s screaming again. I’m going to lie
down on my bed, love. Will you stay with me?
My clothes no longer fit. They need to buy
me more, that aren’t so tight. I like pretty.

Carried coal in on his back. My father.
Water’s edge or earth’s end? Which is kinder?

8. Edge or Earth’s

“Water’s edge or earth’s end? Which is kinder?
What do words mean? Getting more like pictures.
What are they showing me? What is this for?
A pen. What do you do with it? Mixtures

of tiny lines. That’s pretty.” Because she
can’t write, but enjoys the sounds I’m making
these verses up for her. I read so she
can listen, recording what she’s saying.

I have to report how she interacts
with other people in here. Make sure she
takes her medication else, she’ll fall back
and her condition worsen more quickly.

Sentences she says really get to me:
“Only strangers now, who say they know me.”

9. Only Strangers Now

“Only strangers now, who say they know me.”
She says. I don’t want to add to her words,
only take away some if she lets me.
Her talk blooms with allusion, mystery.

Her son says she has books by Rod Mckuen,
“Listen to the Warm” , Russian Yevgeny
Yevtushenko, “Selected Poems”. When
I mention names, she has no memory.

She sings “The sun has got his hat on. Hip,
hip, hooray. The sun has got his hat on.”
One hand on top of her summer hat lifts
it in time so it flops to the rhythm.

Other times gentleness is hers, and yours
“Hold my hand, take me down long corridors.”

10. Hold My Hand, Take Me

“Hold my hand, take me down long corridors.”
All patients are locked in permanently.
Each has their own en-suite room and their doors
only open to their key cards. Toiletries

are extra fees we access from accounts
set up by their loved ones. Sometimes we ask
for relatives to bring in more clothes. Counts
If we can email, text or phone with facts.

Loved ones updated with latest virus
news, how can visit after negative
test result. Before, windows clean glass
to see them through. We think/act positive.

She waits for them while we show we care.
“They have photos. It looks like me, Nowhere”

11. Nowhere

“They have photos. It looks like me, Nowhere”
We try to make it somehow like a home
from home. An opportunity to share
their past lives. Their fresh animated tone

the event is in the here and now for
them. It is never them for us. We use
first names all the time. Hold it in great store
as a family. Our wordsmith we’ll choose

to call Pam taps her shoulders when she talks
of her dad who would carry packed sackfuls
of coal on his back. Pam when she slow walks
with you steadies herself against her falls.

Always walk pace of slowest ones. She roars:
“I can recall. How did I reach these shores?”

12. These Shores

“I can recall. How did I reach these shores?”
Pam was transferred from an emergency
care place, after neighbour saw her outdoors
pacing her front garden. Community

welfare came out with police to remove
her, as a danger to herself and others.
Her late husband had already been moved
into a respite place to recover.

She had not been taking the drugs prescribed,
so rapid decline inevitable.
Back on regular medication, slide
to a lower plateau less possible.

We can slow the process, not stop decline.
“Did I come to this place with things of mine?”

13. I Come to

“Did I come to this place with things of mine?”
Powered attorneys brought Pam’s belongings,
her husband having died in the meantime.
Soon, all will be unbelongings.

Belonging only in the heads of those
who knew her. She will leave her words, art:
sketches she made of her three cats of whose
names: Hoppy and Missy, she knew by heart.

It is sad to talk of someone living
as if they have already passed away.
Some relatives are shocked to find filling
body of one they knew is a strangers gaze.

Professional, you can’t help get close: her rhyme:
“Is that wave for mine? Is it now my time?”

14. Wave For

“Is that wave for mine? Is it now my time?”
Pam talks of ocean as taker away
of value she’s gathered on the shoreline.
Unaware others are with her each day.

A strange time for all, when keen avoidance
of others has been the key to our health.
We have felt loss sharply, hugs and street dance,
a dosey do, a time outside ourselves.

Locked in Pam is a stranger to all this,
perhaps she has noted the extra cleaning,
masks so she can’t see our smiling faces.
Her world smaller, stranger each new morning.

I’ll leave the final words to her: she sings
“Sat at tideline with all my belongings.”

15. The Unresolvables

Sat at tideline with all my belongings.
My photos, my ornaments, all gathered
against receding waves that keep pulling
all away from me, memories tethered

by my frantic grasp to prevent their drift
into forgottenness. They are reminders.
How did I find myself here, a spindrift?
Water’s edge or earth’s end? Which is kinder?

Only strangers now, who say they know me.
Hold my hand, take me down long corridors.
They have photos. It looks like me, Nowhere
I can recall. How did I reach these shores?

Did I come to this place with things of mine?
Is that wave for mine? Is it now my time?

-Paul Brookes (First published in Fevers of the Mind https://feversofthemind.com/2021/05/17/the-unresolveables-an-heroic-crown-sonnet-sequence-by-paul-brookes/

The Day My Grandad Disappeared 

A knock at our front door. A Doctor has brought Grandad home. Grandad has gone into a Doctors believing he has an appointment.

Grandad goes for a paper, for the footie pages. As he does everyday, dressed immaculately, jacket, waistcoat, tie, black shoes shining.

Nana and he arrive a couple of days ago to help Dad again in caring for Mam, who is fighting Breast Cancer. Always a quiet man. Keeps himself to himself. Even when I am a child and we go to see the latest James Bond he says very little. He talks footie but I am not into that. He does Littlewoods Pools and Spot the Ball.

He comes in from sorting at the Post Office, walks through the lounge door, bangs the door with one hand as his other hand grabs his nose and laughs. He is good, we laugh too.

Grandad is very late. Grandad left three hours ago. Nana wants to call local hospitals fearing he has been knocked down. Dad drives around the village, pops into the newsagents. Grandad has not bought his paper.

My grandad suffers illnesses. Among my late Nanas belongings I discover a note he has written.

Ellesmere Port.    Pneumonia May     1942 Dec 1942

When I had been in the army a year my health began to deteriate  I had Pneumonia twice in six months The last time I almost lost my life They sent for my wife and sat with me alnight  When I was twenty two I had mumps in hospital again I was never rid of styes in my eyes having to go in hospital again as Both my eyes closed. Had pains in my Back although I didn’t go in hospital I was put on light duties for a fortnight When I was on leave I saw my own doctor who gave me injection in my Back I have a disabled Badge in my car and  am under hospital care as an outpatient for my stomach another specialist for my chest.

The note appears to have been written sometime later, perhaps as evidence for a new doctor.

In a 1993 poetry anthology ‘Rats For Love:The Book’ my poem ‘Bait’ describes the banter between Nana and Grandad. It describes how she felt about his forgetfulness before he was diagnosed:

Married forty years to the same man. Ate with her mouth open. Talked with her mouth full. Masticated his forgetfulness through two romantic lovers between the pages. Cut with some bloodless cold steel then tongued from cheek to cheek morsels of his past with her: Who lost his false teeth … … Ieft his pipe on the bin lid outside … kept new clothes unwrapped for years … did not like driving in the dark … ? She levered chewed events from good teeth, pushed them down to the acid below through shredding walls to feed blood and bile that formed into words goading him to grab the bait. And when he did she hauled him in to be filleted, iced and sold to others as good quality food to be eaten.

The title is a play on words that is not made obvious in the poem. My Nana is born in Sunderland and the North East dialect word for food is ‘bait.’

Especially after Mam dies of Cancer, Grandad gradually forgets how to care for himself. Nana looks after him until it gets too much for her too.

 Nana buys packs of incontinence pants as Grandad loses control of his bowels. She puts new ones on, bins the old. Grandad does not help, as on one of many occasions he gets into bed, soils himself, takes off the pants while in bed, and throws them on the bedroom floor soiled side down.

A large man Nana has to bath him, then try to get him out of the bath when he will not move.

He has spells in local care homes, gradually stays longer and longer. A respite for Nana.

Nana ensures he has what she calls ‘decent’ clothes in his suitcase, each piece of clothing painstakingly labelled with his name. When he returns home she is forever phoning the homes about someone elses clothes in the returned suitcase. On one occasion, Grandad walks five miles from Care home to Nana’s.

Last time I see Grandad my wife and I treat both him and Nana to a Sunday pub lunch at Knox Arms. A  stone built pub about two miles from Nanas.

Nana dresses Grandad immaculately, razor sharp trouser creases, spotless shirt, waistcoat, matching tie  Throughout, our visit Grandad never speaks. We order a Taxi to the pub. At the Knox, Nana tucks a paper napkin into Grandad’s shirt, and when it arrives cuts his roast dinner up for him. Nana talks throughout about daily problems with Grandads incontinence pads and staff in the homes, the uselessness of Social Services. On the walk home I notice Grandads waistcoat and shirt gravy stained and ribbons of carrot cling to the underside of his lip.

I search his eyes for recognition of who I am, from the time I say hello to the time I say goodbye to him sat in his favourite chair at Nanas. My Grandad has disappeared..

-Paul Brookes