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For many of us, the natural world has been a source of great solace during the long weeks of lock-down, and we therefore decided to celebrate World Environment Day today, 5 June, by highlighting
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Subterranea is a first collection of poetry by Jos Smith that explores the relationship of our human world to the earth that underpins it. At times delicate and curious, at times painfully unbalanced, it is a relationship of always precarious intimacy, and one that is often most vividly apprehended in the imagination. Subterranea is a collection that measures its own poetic form against the earth's resistance, knowing full well that if there is to be any relationship at all something must give in us; that perhaps there might even be an art to this giving.
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Skew
The rain came flecking and pocking through bog-water rushes,
through the blackthorn scrub and the slopes of bilberry bushes.
It built in droves of flood-water slumping against the wind.
All day over the burnt-out ends of August’s flowers,
ploughing its fingertips down through the soil. Rain,
strange rain, collapsed rain, hauled itself up
and collapsed again, drowning, scouring, filling those
mired valley sides, an intense consummation that
we soon felt we were intruding upon. Then it stopped.
Peat-beds gurgled. Light glinted in beads on the heather.
The air simply lifted around us – we never felt so heavy,
so grounded as then, bereft and exposed, in a brilliant wind.
There is no going back now, look at us standing speechless,
sun going down a red ultimatum and the drive home a journey
into a piercing, precarious moment where everything,
everything matters.
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Katrina Porteous writes: “… A sense of collective responsibility haunts these careful, well-crafted poems. Here, geography is history, language is music, and human creativity a facet of nature. In the remarkable central sequence ‘A Plume of Smoke’ which bears witness to the Torrey Canyon oil spill of 1967, sea, land, plants, animals, birds and people react to the disaster as part of a singe organism which, in its uneasy recovery, becomes an emblem for our relation to the whole planet.”
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Special Offer:
Up to and including 14 June, you can buy the
hardback edition for the price of the paperback edition
at the 25%-off sale price.
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And to end with, the German poet Jan Wagner reads from Self-portrait with a Swarm of Bees (translated by Iain Galbraith)
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He reads in both German and English.
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