sheenaghpugh | Review of Terminarchy by Angela France, pub. Nine Arches Press 2021 (Reply)

there’s enough warmth in the air for bare arms, and at home
the heating’s been off for weeks. Sparrow mutters behind me
We’ll pay for this!

(“Early Spring”)

It is typical of this collection that an innocuous title like “Early Spring” should turn out to be, not some Victorian or Georgian celebration of poetry’s (alleged) favourite season, but a warning about how climate change is disrupting the seasons. Sparrow, putting in his sardonic two penn’orth over the poet’s shoulder, is a constant presence. Smaller and livelier than Hughes’s Crow, he is also sarkier and conveys his unwelcome news with a wry humour, in another poem with an ambiguous title:

     Rooks gather, their rusty calls ratcheting
    from the branches and a voice whispers
    at my shoulder Nice place, if you can keep it.
    (“Getting Late”)

It will be clear by now that this collection’s concerns are primarily ecological. Like all the best ecological poetry, it neither preaches nor accentuates the negative; the focus, mostly, is not on “look what we’ve lost” but “look what we have, and dare not risk losing”, which is not only a more productive approach but results in a lot more enjoyment for the reader. Often this comes from her sharp, humour-leavened observation of the natural world:

    The frog clambers up from the dark
   chippings, piano-fingered hands spread to grip
    bark as it shifts and slides, pauses on top
    of the pile. I can see its throat pulsing, perfect
    dots along sharp back-ridges, cleanly banded legs
    in Halloween witch-stockings.
   (“Suddenly a frog”)

But she seldom forgets for long that what she observes with such pleasure is fragile and endangered. It shows in the sombre image in “Growth”:

     Blackthorn chokes
    the stile, spatters petals on the ground
    like leucocytes.

A similar sudden, emotional wrench ends this sentence from “Singing lessons”:

    Blackbird sometimes shows himself, lets me watch
   song spill from his beak, the liquid trill of his courting,
   the sharp chook chook as he warns of a dog, or a cat,
   or me.

It is a human instinct to turn away from what we fear, especially if we feel unable to do much about it, and this too is addressed in this collection: there is a presence of modern technology here that might surprise those who think “nature poets” don’t do that sort of thing. The disguised villanelle “Blame” begins with a woman in whom most of us could see ourselves:

     She looks outside, twenty-eight days with no rain
    and the grass is browning to the colour of barley
    while she cruises online for someone to blame.

It ends:

    She’s tired, this level of anger can’t be sustained
   Sparrow says it won’t matter, come the terminarchy;
   outside it’s been a hundred days without rain
   and spending all day online is partly to blame.

This of course is literally true: keyboard eco-warriors themselves use plenty of earth’s resources simply by being online, but it is also true in a deeper sense that turning away from a problem makes it worse – as she remarks in “Rooting out”, about weeding, “it is too easy to rest, leave/a calm surface undisturbed”. There is a lot of uneasy seeing beyond the surface of things in these poems: at one point she echoes Richard Wilbur’s poem “Junk”, in which he imagines ill-made, shoddy artefacts in a bin returning to earth and being remade into something better. She cannot share this consolation, knowing, as he would not have done, about the “minute beads we make of plastic and petroleum” and how hard it is for plastic, in particular, to be unmade, even if it “drops to the depth of diamonds”. In the end there is both a recognition of how difficult it is for most people who aren’t Greta Thunberg to pay enough attention to the state of the planet, and an insistence that nevertheless, there is no way to ignore it in comfort either.

     Scrolling feels like vertigo; hearts
    and kittens don’t dilute constant crises
    and paying attention is like the stark
    brilliance of winter sun on a wet road;
    all I see ahead is the shape of something dark.

(“Scrolling”)