Review of “100 Poems To Save the Earth” eds Zoe Brigley and Kristian Evans, Seren 2021

[sheenaghpugh]

This is my month for reviewing anthologies. Two, which have in common both “100 Poems” in the title and a certain ambiguity as to the remit. I should mention that I have a poem in this one, though as usual I feel I can reasonably review the rest of it. 

The introduction makes it clear that the title is deliberately “provocative”; the editors do not imagine that poems can of themselves save anything. What they hope for is that reading them can inspire people to “slow down”, “pay attention and notice what we have been missing.” So, eco-poetry, but the intro also states “we have abandoned a traditional view of “nature poetry” or “environmental writing”, especially where it sidelines particular groups (eg people of the global majority/BAME/BIPOC writers, LGBTQ+ poets, or writers with disabilities)”
 

I’m not quite sure how this sidelining works (are lesbian poets debarred from writing nature poems, or writers with disabilities unable to be concerned about the environment?) but the implication, I think, is that the anthology concerns itself as much with human beings as with the planet they (we) are busy destroying. Certainly this seems to be true of the poems chosen. There are poems, not as many as you’d expect, that focus purely on other species or the environment itself, poems that place humans in the context of the world around them, poems that use environmental concerns as a metaphor for human concerns, and ones that, at least to me, seem to focus entirely on humans and have little or nothing to do with the purported theme (though most are still eminently readable for their own sake).

I think I get the rationale behind this. The editors want readers to see themselves as part of the planet, not outside or in opposition to it. There is sense in this, but, I think, also a danger, that of seeing the earth as being there for our benefit. It is notable how several poems here arise from new parenthood, and understandable that people with that perspective have a heightened care for the world they want to preserve for posterity. But that’s just the problem; we ought not to want tigers to survive so that our grandchildren can look at them, or bees because they fertilise our crops, but for their own sake, because they have as much right to be here as we do. One of the most important poems here, I think, is Tishani Doshi’s “Self”, and more poets should heed her comment: 

     The shock we carry is that the world
     doesn’t need us. 

Not that humans have no place in eco-poetry. One of the poems that really impressed me was Paula Meehan’s “Death of a Field”. From its opening line, “The field itself is lost the morning it becomes a site”, this addresses the conflict between seeing a place as itself and seeing it as a resource or commodity. It chronicles what is lost: 

     Who amongst us is able to number the end of grasses
    To number the losses of each seeding head? 

It also chronicles the housing estate which will take their place: 

     The end of dandelion is the start of Flash
    The end of dock is the start of Pledge
    The end of teazel is the start of Ariel 

- and this is where it manages to be brilliantly dispassionate, for of course there is no denying that people need housing, and most of the stuff that goes with it. Indeed the field whose loss she mourns was probably itself there because some Iron Age farmer cleared a patch of forest. By being in the world, we change it; the best we can do is be aware of this and try to limit our effect.

Another poem that emphasises this need for awareness is Joanna Klink’s “Some Feel Rain”, in which the voice wonders why some are so much in tune with the world around them that they sense 

     tiny blinkings of ice from the oak,
    a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer
    you can follow from the dusking wind to the snowy owl
    it carries 

while others wonder “why the earth cannot make its way towards” them. 

Many of the voices here are new and very welcome to me, and there were few poems I disliked, though I’ll admit to feeling impatient with Simon Armitage’s overdone agonising about kicking a mushroom. I apologise if this was in fact intended to be comic; I did laugh, but suspected I wasn’t meant to. With some poems, I thrilled to a sensitive and vivid evocation of nature, only to come down somewhat when the ending turned it all into a metaphor for some human activity. “Too often”, to quote the introduction, “it seems the earth is a mirror, in which we find only ourselves”. I was grateful for poets like Alice Oswald and Pascale Petit, who don’t think seabirds and tigers need to be anything but seabirds and tigers. There is a merciful absence of the kind of overt, finger-wagging didacticism that used to disfigure eco-poetry but seems to have all but died out. I’m not sure about the title and core concept, nor how a few of the poems fit it, but there is some seriously interesting reading here. 

The poem that, for me, perhaps best encapsulated the theme of awareness was Jen Hadfield’s “Our Lady of Isbister”, with its echoed “O send me another life like this”.  It enumerates small things:

    I want the same lochans as I had before –
    the wind driving spittlestrings
    to skimpy shores of dark red stone;
    same hot sweet slaw
    of muck and shit and trampled straw;
    the chimney bubbling transparent heat;
    a whirpool of Muscovy ducks;
    paet-reek;
    a scrambling clutch of piglet-pups

before ending in a kind of epiphany of realisation that there can be nothing better, anywhere, than the planet where we currently are: 

     O send me another last life like this –
    This is bliss
                                              this
    no, this
                                                             no, this.