Jean Atkin

Jean Atkin’s third full collection ‘High Nowhere’ was published by IDP in late 2023, and is her ninth poetry publication. Previous books include ‘How Time is in Fields’ (IDP), ‘The Bicycles of Ice and Salt’ (IDP) and ‘Fan-peckled’ (Fair Acre Press). Her poetry has won competitions, been commissioned, anthologised, and featured on BBC Radio 4. She has been BBC National Poetry Day Poet for Shropshire and Troubadour of the Hills for Ledbury Poetry Festival. She has worked as a poet in education and community since 2010.


http://www.jeanatkin.com @wordsparks on X jean.atkin on Instagram and Threads Jean Atkin on FB

The Interview

Q:1. How did you decide on the order of the poems in High Nowhere?

The order of the poems in High Nowhere fell gradually into place for me over the three years I’ve been writing this collection. I knew I wanted to write a book which expressed how I felt about living at this time, and through these years. I began with my deep concerns and grief over the loss of biodiversity that’s everywhere, the steady rollcall of extinctions. And these still sit at the start of the book, under the title ‘Brink’.
At the same time the idea for ‘High Nowhere’ itself appeared to me (while plodding up a big ascent in the Welsh borders!). I think of it as a placename which could be whatever place we are looking at with attention. So I started writing High Nowhere poems in a variety of different locations. They slowly assumed their own form, so they all begin – ‘In High Nowhere now’, are 6 lines long in paired couplets, and have sound patterning that links the final couplets together.
I also wanted to write about my perception of the climate crisis, and with this in mind, I also wrote a section called ‘Source’ about energy.
I became very interested in seeing Iceland, where the glaciers are melting. Iceland has a culture based on living with what much of the world would perceive as especially challenging conditions – even before the climate crisis. A volcanic island with ferocious weather conditions, it now suffers storms of even greater intensity, and even less predictability.
Then came the pandemic, which (with difficulty as a freelance poet and educator) I worked through, and wrote through. These are the poems in the section called ‘Spread’.
And between the long spring lockdown of 2021 and the covid spikes of winter 2021-22 – I got my chance and was lucky enough to visit Iceland, accompanied by an Icelandic geologist. This section formed the core of the book – and I called this part ‘High Nowhere’ – for if anywhere is High Nowhere, Iceland is.
The following section is called ‘Fable’, and is about the way we humans try to understand a changing world: these poems are imaginings, new myths, and dreams.
And finally, the poems in this book have to confront the anxieties of living ‘now’. But I am actually a hopeful person, and I wanted to reflect, at the end of the book, how full of wonder I find the world. So the final section is called ‘Path’.



Q:2. How important is poetic form to you in this book?


It’s fair to say that in this book I used poetic form in response to what each poem seemed to need. The exception, see above, is the group of High Nowhere poems, which are scattered throughout the book, and for which I consciously kept to a created form that I devised.
Most of the other poems are written in quite tight stanzas, with only a little full rhyme. There are a couple of prose poems. I like my poems to feel tight, rather than baggy; and I do firmly believe that less is more.


Q:3. What did the geologist provide for the section “High Nowhere”?


My geologist friend organised me into seeing so much! She drove us into the interior on the ash roads, and talked about the conditions there, the fierce rivers, the phenomenon of glacial outburst flooding. She took us to Landmannalaugar and walked us around the lava fields, the hot springs and the extraordinary Blahnúkúr, the Blue Mountain. She supervised the hiring of basic camper vans, and we set off to see glaciers, icebergs, museums and turf churches. She even organised my opportunity to ride an Icelandic horse across a glacial river.
I asked her streams of questions, about the geology, about the language, about the folklore, all of which she bore with patience and humour. She made an enormous difference.


Q:3.1. Intriguing. How did the folklore influence your writing on climate change?

Some of the Icelandic folklore has echoes of Scottish folklore – for example the selkie story. And some of it is more specifically Icelandic, I think, such as the story about the red-headed whale at the huge Glymur waterfalls. All these stories are very tightly tied to place, which always interests me, and they speak to an understanding of and familiarity with place and climate, that today’s more urban, more alienated populations often have much less access to. I felt these stories were important to explore in a book about place, climate, and awareness. I found myself reaching for story again in the section I called ‘Fable’, too. Story is how we understand the world, and perhaps ourselves.

Q:4. What was it about the Icelandic language that appealed to you?


It felt to me very much the language of moss and lava fields! A sinewy, vigorous, outdoor tongue – with placenames like Haifoss (which is the front cover photo) and volcanoes Hekla and Katla. I was intrigued by the connections of this old Norse language to the dialects of north-west England, where I grew up. Nei, for no, rendered nay in Cumbria. And Icelandic still makes use of what elsewhere in Scandinavia are now archaic symbols, thorn (hard ‘th’) and eth (soft ‘th’) – which I used in the short poem ‘Listening in Icelandic’ –


þ
thorn is sharper, distinct at its tip
holds a raindrop pricked onto each
sound that cannot be extended while
ð
eth whispers like its own ghost
trailing a cloud behind it as if you
brushed by softly through the reeds

Q:5. How did you choose the photographs, and where they should go?

I take photographs when I’m out walking, just with a phone, and I have very few technical skills. But when I ‘see’ an image, I want to catch it. When I began to piece the book together, I imagined it with photographs, in the ‘Rings of Saturn’ manner – so not as literal, illustrative photographs, but images that sit a little to one side, or that might suggest the deepening of a mood, or the passage of a different thought, or a moment. I also like finding text in photographs, and once or twice I felt they landed just right, like the photo at the start of SPREAD. Which I’m sure originally did not say what I read into it.

Looking through the book to answer this question I see that in every case, the poem came first although there is some cross-fertilisation when sometimes what was in the photo transferred to the poem (‘Blahnúkúr 2’). So choosing where to place the photos was sometimes straightforward, like deciding I wanted a photograph of an Icelandic horse to put near to ‘Icelandic’. But for example the photo of the stag beetle is not alongside ‘Cerf-volant, two-star municipal, heatwave’, because these marvellous insects are becoming rare, and so I placed it to introduce the section called BRINK. And I was amazed to find, after writing ‘Grandmothers’, that I had a photo I’d taken ten years ago of our younger son tossing a snowball into the air, and that it was just right.


The photo that introduces the final section PATH is of a bus stop sign near my house. It is very battered, and just says: ‘And Opposite’ – which I take to be exactly the alternate direction I wanted that section to go in.


Q:6. Why is the idea of “place” so important to you?


This is a hard question to answer. I do see that over the years my poetry has been very closely related to my sense of place. I think it’s because place is necessarily limited by the physical planet. And so place contains all time, from geological layers and ice ages to the layers of myriad cultures, stories and societies. And because of that, place is a link to other people, all those who went before us, and those who’ll come later. I am curious about place, and what it can tell me, and I like to walk or cycle, for preference, to have that close sense of the ground shifting and changing as I go. That element of change is very interesting too, as often in recent centuries, we can’t go back to the places we knew as children, and find them unchanged, as many generations would largely have been able to in earlier times. Change is very challenging, so it too is a subject for poetry. High Nowhere is also about how we cope with change, and how we experience and describe it.



Q:7. Once they have read High Nowhere, what do you want the reader to leave with?

I hope the journey through High Nowhere will leave its readers feeling that their fears for the planet, for ourselves and our children are shared. High Nowhere is in some respects the closest I’ve come to political poetry – I do believe there are real villains involved in climate denial and exploitation, and that for the sake of the planet and future generations they must be resisted. I also hope High Nowhere will encourage storytelling about our lives, our plight, our hopes and our futures. And not least, that great joy in the everyday is some of the time still possible, and in itself, is powerful and hopeful.

High Nowhere is available from Indigo Dreams Publishing or from Jean Atkin.

Jean Atkin
http://www.jeanatkin.com