Book Review: Harvest by Jim Crace

May 3, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Harvest cover image hb

Harvest, by Jim Crace

Picador, 2013. £16.99

Hardback, 320 pages. ISBN: 978 0330445665

Review by Jane Stewart

Jane Stewart is a writer who lives and works in Scotland.  She contributed to The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English (ed. Lorna Sage, 1999) and The Chambers Biographical Dictionary of Women (ed. Melanie Parry, 1996) and has a particular interest in historical novels. Jane’s reviews have appeared in Pleiades, the Literateur and the Times Literary Supplement.

Set in a remote, unnamed village in England, some three days away from the nearest market place, during an unspecified year around the time when the early enclosures were starting, this engaging novel resolutely turns its back on the deeds of princes, prelates and kings which often form the basis of historical fiction, and instead, rather like a painting by Brueghel the Elder, it illuminates the lives of ordinary men and women working on the land, by showing their quotidian struggle for survival, their collective sense of place and of belonging, and their fragile dependency on one another and on the whims of nature.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, ca. 1560s (Muséedes Beaux-Arts, Tournai). [Creative Commons]

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, ca. 1560s (Muséedes Beaux-Arts, Tournai). [Creative Commons]

It opens as the villagers gather in the harvest, unaware that their landscape, livelihoods and traditions are about to change for ever.  We learn about village life through the consciousness of narrator, Walter Thirsk, whose education and dark hair mark him as an incomer and different from his flaxen-haired Anglo Saxon neighbours, many of whom have never ventured beyond the village bounds.  Whilst the villagers labour, newly-arrived map-maker, Philip Earle, working with his brushes and quills, is observed by Walter “marking down our land”. “Mr Quill”, as the villagers dub the newcomer, shows them “the scratchings on his chart, the geometrics that he said were fields and woods, the squares that stood for cottages, the ponds, the lanes, the foresting”.  Walter notes that these “scratchings” seem portentous, as if they “might scratch us too, in some unwelcome way”.

As the plot develops, the significance of the charts is apparent to Walter before it becomes so to his neighbours.  He is required to help Mr Quill in his map-making by taking him to every part of the land within the village bounds, and in this way, not only do we learn of its usage, but also of his deep attachment to it. “The web of lines” to which the small community has been reduced by Mr Quill’s penmanship, represents “the closing and engrossment of our fields with walls and hedges, ditches, gates” and heralds the imposition of enclosures where previously a system of open field, arable farming had been carried out by the same families “since Adam’s time”.  At the behest of a new landowner, and in the cause of “Progress and Prosperity”, three thousand sheep are to be brought in and will outnumber the people by fifty to one.

The arrival of more strangers in the village leads to dissent, violence, accusations of witchcraft, and death.  Whilst some of these strangers are intent on clearing the village of its inhabitants and replacing them with sheep, other new arrivals, it transpires, have been already displaced from their former village by sheep.  With the redrawing of the land, a way of life will vanish.

The pace of Harvest flags slightly towards its close, but Crace’s ability to distil the very essence of an unspoiled landscape will more than compensate for this with many readers. We are drawn into Walter’s world by his sense of place and his love for every aspect of his surroundings, by the evocative “bread-and-biscuit smell of rotting wood” and “the piss-and-honey tang of apple trees”, and by his vivid description of the year tipping into autumn:

I smelt the forest and the earth, the dampness of a fast-retreating year, the acridness of leaf mould and a kitchen odour which I could have taken for yeast but yeast that was soured from neglect.

This is a world where everything relates to the natural setting: the breaths of a gasping man are “ladled from a shallow pool”, and even the charnel field is shown to have its own beauty and is fringed with flowers, known to Walter as “longpurples”.

We are immersed, too, in the rhythm of the year and a communal way of life where nothing is wasted.  After harvest, the gleaners move in, then, in succession, cattle, geese and hogs are allowed to forage before it is ploughed again.  Rushes are used for lights, ferns for litter, clay for bricks, peat and turves for roofs and fuel, willows for poles, celandines for gargles, and cowslips for palsy.  Yet this is no rural idyll; the land is “inflexible and stern” and “the great task each year” is to wrest a living from it and to “defend …against hunger and defeat”.   Nothing is certain.  Death stalks the land in many forms.  Whilst incomers may bring welcome extra hands to share the work, they may also bring plague.

Maybe Crace’s greatest achievement in this book is to confront readers with a re-imagined landscape.  Just as the villagers come to envisage their surroundings in a new way through Earle’s coloured charts, so Harvest invites us to conceptualise and map a pre-enclosed, pre-Industrial England without familiar, man-made landmarks. We must imagine away hedges, stone walls and ditches.  In their place, we must conjure open fields scarred by ridge and furrow, the oak tree on the horizon which provides a line for the ploughman with his oxen, the narrow, overgrown lanes through which the villagers move, the dark forest with its fears, real or imaginary, and the village bounds where young children are taken to have their heads banged against a marker stone so they do not stray. Above all, because the impoverished village in Harvest is unable to fund a church or a clergyman, this newly-imagined view of rural England is devoid of the church spires and towers which now punctuate it.  Crace appears to be suggesting that, perhaps, by re-envisioning our landscape in this way, we can come to a different appreciation of its history and intrinsic value.

- – - – - – - -

Harvest is published by Picador (UK) and Nan A. Talese (US) 

Harvest cover image US

Filed Under: Book reviews Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Book Review: Beacons: Stories for our not so distant future

April 13, 2013 By 1 Comment

Beacons cover image

Beacons: Stories for Our Not So Distant Future, edited by Gregory Norminton

Oneworld Publications, 2013. £8.99

Paperback. 256 pages. ISBN: 9781851689699

Review by Daniel Kramb

Daniel Kramb is the author of two novels: the climate change-themed From Here (Lonely Coot, 2012), and the Hackney-set Dark Times (New Generation Publishing, 2010). His collection of poems Timid Takes (Lonely Coot, 2013), was published in March this year.

Daniel lives and works in London. www.danielkramb.com

 

We used to be kings of this world, kid. Or so we thought. But kings get overturned in the end, and sometimes all it takes is a stone to bring down the oldest of empires.

Joanne Harris’s ‘A is for Acid Rain, B is for Bee’ is a terrifying dispatch from a future where the “outside” has become an alien concept, where real wildlife has been confined to the fading memories of those who lived when “some of us kids still walked to school”, where we have started to think that “maybe the earth is allergic to us – maybe we’re the insects, and all this is the final stage in a long, slow process of rejection”. Kings no more, that’s for sure.

Joanne Harris kicks off Beacons: Stories for Our Not So Distant Future, a new collection of 21 original short stories responding to the climate crisis. It’s a richly varied collection – ranging from speculative accounts of our future, to satire and allegory, to the here-and-now of people’s personal response to climate change, and includes Nick Hayes’s beautifully illustrated story of the bond between man and nature, ‘The Possession of Lachlan Lubanach’. It’s “not polemical,” as the collection’s editor, Gregory Norminton, points out in his introduction, “nor is it a policy document or a lifestyle guide. It is, rather, a meeting place for new stories that recognize where we are and where we might be heading”.

The back-and-forth between these two, the “where we are” and the “where we might be heading” (in many different versions), is one of the collection’s great strengths. Throughout the book, I was made aware, often strikingly so, of what humankind stands to lose: “The young will know the Rio Grande only from the pre-Rise maps their parents bring out to show where Ma and Pa used to live”, says the narrator of Lawrence Norfolk’s ‘Earthship’, a Death Valley-set story of a relationship break-up, “but old-landers will remember this part of it from the hot springs bathing scene in Easy Rider”.

In James Miller’s excellent ‘What is Left to See?’ Miami can only be visited by helicopter. The story begins in a chat-room. #Me5elle tells her teenage friend about her recent visit to the city. The kind of language we might use is evoked brilliantly: “Good job us #newgirls don’t get so bothered #environment-attachment so #oldtimer”. It then moves to Athens, Greece, “shortly after now” (and back and forth after that), where a young American student makes the acquaintance of a refugee, selling tourist trash:

Their stories were all different, but the theme was always the same: pushed from their land by drought, famine, and flood, driven onwards by war and unrest. Abu-Bakr had thought it was just his country that was broken. Now he realized it was half the world.

Mass migration – one of the potential implications of climate change we tend to shy away from because we can’t quite stomach the consequences – is addressed very effectively in Beacons. Mike Robinson is right, it seems, when he points out in his ‘Afterword’ that writers can fill an important gap:

Writers and artists can voice our concerns and build up our confidence to act. By experimenting with different scenarios, they can lessen our fear of change, appealing to people’s right brain: heart, soul, gut, eyes, fingers, ears, and skin; they can immerse readers in, and create a mood for, new thinking in a way that constant recycling of the science simply cannot.

When, in Clare Dudman’s ‘Like Canute’, a refugee appears in front of the protagonist’s fridge in the middle of the night, his logic is simple: “I hungry. I have baby, wife, child. They all cry. You not need. I do”.  Another unsettling, potential implication – armed conflict – is being dealt with, devastatingly, in Jem Poster’s ‘Visitation’. Here, soldiers patrol the Welsh countryside for “protestors, draft-dodgers, saboteurs. The so-called resistance”. It’s deeply saddening to watch them as they burn down a widowed farm-owner’s barn (for security reasons; it’s located close to a refinery), and yet, it seems to be one of the more harmless acts committed in order to protect the “freedom to live as we want”, as the soldiers put it.

Beacons is divided into three sections: ‘Looking in the Mirror’; ‘A Strand in the Web’; ‘Go Light’, but these are loose groupings. Readers shouldn’t expect a coherent overall narrative or smooth transition from story to story: climate change isn’t that kind of issue and this isn’t that kind of collection. It brings together very different writers:  some are close to climate change as an issue, others might be writing about it for the first time, some have decided to make the issue the core of their contribution, and others have written stories where it lives largely in the background. Writing styles, too, vary widely.

In the hands of a master, we enter a future where the consumption of meat has become an activity requiring “permissions” (to be posted on windows and doors). Marcko, the protagonist in A. L. Kennedy’s ‘Meat’, knows the neighbours will “think badly of him”, and not just them. After all, he has just “spent 6000 panyan on this – a single meal. Irresponsibility”. It’s fascinating to be inside Marcko’s head, listening in to his self-justification, as he prepares meat for him and his son:

This was simply Need. Marcko’s own personal need.

Not even that – this was evidence of Marcko’s Want.

The most unforgivable sin.

Marcko had harboured Self-Seeking Desire. He had strengthened and indulged it until it had kidnapped his will.

Meat.

Liz Jensen’s contribution is a chilling account of a future where climate change-threatened people get “Zero-rated”. In ‘Mother Moon’s Job’, these unfortunate “Zeros” and “Sub-Zeros” are being convinced by dubious TV shows that suicide is the honourable thing to do. When a young girl, whose mother has just followed orders (“Five floors is a long way, if you’re someone falling”), confronts the TV host, she hears: “Honest truth, the big picture can’t afford people like Mummy”.

In one of my favourite stories, Holly Howitt brilliantly turns the meaning of the much-abused word “green” upside down. In ‘The Weatherman’, “Green people” are those living in a zone where mankind has learned to control the weather: “You press this button, it rains. You press this one, the sun shines”. The controlled environment allows them to keep growing food – to the detriment of those living in the nearby “sandtowns”. It’s a powerful taster for some of the moral complications we might have to deal with in a warming world.

For me, Beacons is the latest sign that ‘climate change literature’ is coming out of its corner. It follows Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour, a novel that weaves the issue – with all its conflicts and contradictions – into the story of a struggling marriage in rural Tennessee. The book was published in the autumn last year, a few weeks after I had posted a little provocation to the Guardian’s Book Blog, asking: Where is all the climate change fiction? From Here, combines a love story with one about climate change and “activism”. It brings together an unlikely alliance of people (a supermarket cashier, a hipster girl, a think tank researcher…), who have all realised – in very different ways – how the issue touches them to the core. When a political assistant gate-crashes the group, apparently destroying their idealism, the scene is set for conflict (and, ultimately, surprising action).

To put climate change at the heart of a novel earned me some scepticism, but things are changing. Beacons proves that it’s possible to write engaging fiction that takes the issue seriously, without losing any of what makes fiction great (and without being depressing or, worse, preachy). I suspect that soon enough, stories like the ones collected here will lose their need for a label, as will climate change novels. I agree with Stephanie Bernhard’s assertion that the issue is likely to become a fictional theme so “painfully known to readers that it will hardly need to be named” (The New Inquiry*).

For now, however, ‘climate change literature’ remains a useful category for our collective coming-to-terms with climate change through stories. Beacons is a hugely important addition to it.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

Beacons: Stories from our not so distant future is available from Oneworld Publications -  Note- all author royalties from the collection will go to the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition

You can find details about Daniel Kramb’s writing and where to buy his books from his website. www.danielkramb.com

Daniel stirred a good discussion about climate change literature on the Guardian’s book blog last December, which is worth a look. See also the comments on climate change and science fiction and futuristic literature.

*Stephanie Bernhard’s essay, ‘Climate Changed’, was published in The New Inquiry in January 2013.

Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour was reviewed on The EarthLines Review earlier this year.

Filed Under: Book reviews Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Book Review: A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki

March 31, 2013 By 2 Comments

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth OzekiA Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki (Canongate)

Review by Janette Currie

 

A tiny sparkle caught Ruth’s eye, a small glint of refracted sunlight angling out from beneath a massive tangle of drying bull kelp, which the sea had heaved up onto the sand at full tide. She mistook it for the sheen of a dying jellyfish and almost walked right by it. The beaches were overrun with jellyfish these days, the monstrous red stinging kind that looked like wounds along the shoreline.

From barnacle-encrusted jetsam that washes up on a beach in Desolation Sound, British Columbia, Ruth Ozeki weaves together a highly innovative tale about time and the self. Ruth the narrator, like Ozeki, is an American writer with Japanese ancestry. She is a novelist who, for ten years, has worked on a memoir which she began as a way to record both her mother’s decline into Alzheimer’s and also “her own feelings and reactions”. Suffering from writer’s block and unable to contemplate reading over what she has written to “consolidate the structure” of the “ungainly heap” she turns to the diary inside the Hello Kitty lunch-box she has found on the beach. She goes in search of sixteen-year old Nao, both in the literal purple prose of the handwritten diary and online for traces of evidence that she was a ‘real’ person. She looks everywhere and anywhere across time where Nao could have left her mark. So far, so normal. What raises this novel from good to dazzling is the way that Ozeki draws attention to the creative process and blurs the division between teller and tale, reader and writer. Ruth the novelist writes a tale about a novelist-turned-memoirist called Ruth who turns from writing herself into being to reading another self into being – that of a teenager called Nao (pronounced Now) who has written herself and her great-grandmother into being – and the whole is written into existence by Ruth (the narrator) who annotates the tale. At a further step, Ozeki as creator brings the reader into existence to read a tale formed out of the “gyre memory” of oceanic drift.

If all of this sounds pretentious it most definitely is not. A Tale for the Time Being is highly engaging, thoughtful rather than didactic. Nao’s diary is concealed within the covers of a “hacked” copy of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Alongside her record of peer-bullying, a depressed father and decent to the darker side of life (she writes her diary in a “French” café in Electric Town, Tokyo) she relates part of her great-grandmother’s autobiography. Jiko is a 104 year old feminist–radical-Buddhist nun who lives in a remote temple. Nao visits her for part of the novel and gains insight and solace but not enlightenment. Back at home her life is still tortuous. Also within Nao’s diary are pages from a family “secret French diary”: stories within stories.

Strong narrative voices add authenticity to the parallel narratives. Nao’s forced jollity grates at times, after all, there’s only so much teen angst anyone can take.

I had to look on the bright side and try to make the best of things. At least Dad hadn’t hijacked the bus and driven it off the side of the mountain. At least he was still here with me, and maybe- maybe he wouldn’t leave. Maybe I could do something to make him stay. Because even though he promised to come back and pick me up at the end of my vacation and take me to Disneyland, what if he didn’t? What if the special doctors couldn’t fix him? Or what if, on the way home, the urge to die got too intense, and he suddenly had to hurl himself onto the tracks in front of the oncoming Disneyland Super Express? He didn’t really care about shaking hands with Mickey-chan after all.

Ozeki peels back the emoticons and exclamatory tone and injects pathos so that we can sympathise with Nao as much as we want to tell her to take it down a notch or two. Ruth adds scholarly footnotes to Nao’s diary where she explains references to complex theories, unfamiliar concepts and contextual material (quantum physics, Zen Buddhism, WWII kamikaze pilots) and these are further cross-referenced to appendices that expand on specific topics, such as Schrödinger’s cat and Hugh Everett’s theory of “many worlds”. The effect of Ruth’s writing in the margins of Nao’s diary draws attention to both the tale and its telling.

An outsider in Whaletown, a “spectre of the past” (“whales are time beings”), Ruth shares a wooden house outside of town with her ecologically-aware husband Oliver, who teaches permaculture. Oliver considers that the lunch-box has probably broken off from one of the “eleven great planetary gyres”, a “drifter” from the wreckage of the Japanese tsunami. In the forest, he observes “time unfolding … history embedded in the whorls and fractal forms of nature”.

Anticipating the effects of global warming on the native trees, he was working to create a climate-change forest on a hundred acres of clear-cut … He planted groves of ancient natives- metasequoia, giant sequoia, coast redwoods, Juglans, Ulmus, and ginkgo- species that had been indigenous to the area during the Eocene Thermal Maximum, some 55 million years ago.

Through Oliver’s battles against misinformation and fierce local opposition to his planting scheme Ozeki examines the connectedness of life across time. On a trip to a secret clam garden they consider the irony of “native” Pacific oysters, which originated from Japan. “ ‘You used to be able to walk barefoot on the beaches’ ”, Oliver says, as they look over a landscape of razor-sharp oyster shells and Ruth wonders “when the last oyster was harvested in the beds around Manhattan ”.

A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be …

You wonder about me.

I wonder about you.

Who are you and what are you doing?

What are you doing now? I have only scratched the surface of this heartbreaking, uplifting novel. A Tale for the Time Being is a testament to the power of words – a tale whose ideas and characters resonate long after the final page.

Note -I read the paperback version which comes with a ‘fully interactive paperback jacket’. It’s also available in a hardback and eBook bundle.

See Ruth Ozeki’s website for details.

Filed Under: Book reviews Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Book Review: Out of Essex: Re-Imagining a Literary Landscape by James Canton

March 15, 2013 By 2 Comments

Out of Essex: Re-imagining a Literary Landscape, by James Canton

Signal Books 2013. Pbk, 256 pp. £12.99

ISBN 978-1-908493-79-8

Review by Janette Currie

OutofEssexOut of Essex: Re-imagining a Literary Landscape is a kaleidoscopic journey across the county synonymous with fake tans, peroxide, partying and reality-tv. “ ‘It’s a kind of literary psychogeography of the Essex countryside’ ”, James Canton explains to Kerry Rolison, the manager of the Sun Trap Field Garden he meets at High Beach. He is retracing John Clare’s journey out of captivity – not the full four day, eighty-mile trek from Epping Forest to Helpston – but Clare’s first, faltering footsteps of July 1841 when he took the wrong turn and headed towards Enfield, ending up in the ‘Labour in Vain’ pub. Canton’s project is hard to define, although Ronald Blythe’s incisive introduction helpfully guides our reading. Literary history and a search for important buildings, travel writing, environmental and ecological concerns folded into autobiography and personal reminiscences. It’s an attempt to redress the balance. Canton visits places with writer connections and places as “lost to history” as Clare’s pub, which he looks for but can’t find. He experiences the landscape as he passes through. At High Beach he thinks his way into Clare’s footsteps and wonders how he would have felt travelling from forest stillness to the “suburban detritus” and discovers personal connectedness in a shared journey out of Essex.

The book is structured in ten chapters, illustrated with photographs of writers, pages from archive records, hand-drawn and printed maps which add texture to Canton’s search into the literary history of major and lesser-well know writers, like Clare, who have some kind of tie to the Essex landscape: Shakespeare, Defoe, Conrad, H. G. Wells and Ransome, together with, J. A. Baker, Samuel Purchas, Sabine Baring-Gould and the solitary female voice, Margery Allingham. Canton records the people he meets, sharing telephone conversations and emails and snatches of conversations with helpful librarians and local historians, publicans, pensioners and housewives. From countryside to town and back again, he follows clues about J. A. Baker, reclusive writer of The Peregrine, he speculates about whether Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Castle Hedingham and took the name ‘Puck’ from a local landmark and then wonders whether someone else wrote Shakespeare’s plays. He treats local tales with the same seriousness as archived letters and academic texts, merging gossip with literary criticism. He traces Clare’s poetry through fragments gifted to the painter, Juan Buckingham Wandesforde, which wound up in Boston via San Francisco and examines sonnets written at High Beach which Cyrus Redding published in The English Journal. The appeal of these lines, which Canton reprints, is that they reveal how “the Essex woods provide harmony for Clare … four years after being admitted to Allen’s asylums, Clare has found peace of mind in Epping Forest”. The love affair between H. G. Wells and Rebecca West is a tale of two places, of “Braughing over the border in Hertfordshire” and Wells’s country home at Little Easton. Is Mr. Britling Sees it Through, Wells’s First World War tale, really about his young mistress, Canton ponders on visiting the present owners of Little Easton. He stands beside the “vast magnificence of an oak which lay in a brown circle of soil upon the green baize of young corn” impressed by the idea that “Wells would have known this tree … I measured the trunk roughly as five stretched-arm lengths, some thirty foot in circumference”. He notes too that “the fig tree which Wells (and Mr. Britling) saw from the study window still grew up the south side of the house”.

Canton constantly turns inward in his Rousseau-esque ‘Reverie’ through the countryside. His own life seeps into the narrative as he flits from thought to thought. The technique is to lay bare the machinery. It works, for the most part. At times, the writing is loose and purple passages sit awkwardly beside detailed nature description, yet, it’s impossible not to be swept along with Canton’s infectious enthusiasm for his quest. A search for Defoe’s house becomes an urgent search for evidence to save a building. Out of Essex is endearing and honest. While most scholars would hide their mistakes Canton is candid. He takes a wrong turn to West Mersea when he should have gone East in search of the Ship Inn where the events retold in Margery Allingham’s Blackkerchief Dick, took place. A copy of Ransome’s Secret Water sent to Jake, his nine-year old nephew sparks a boy’s own adventure and they visit Skipper Island in the Walton Backwaters. They rename the land according to their personal history and come to a literal “Sticky End” when Jake’s Wellington boot is sucked into the mud.

Canton exposes the tensions of the solitary walker. He yearns to be alone while at the same time wanting to be with his family and spend time with his young children, Eva and Molly. These passages where he shares his vulnerability and anxieties and pierces interiority with domestic reality prevent the narrative from becoming overly self-indulgent. For example, when he gives up on the idea of a trip to West’s house we can sympathise with his reasoning:

It was a Saturday afternoon. I’d spent it wandering in a literary shadowland rather than playing with Eva and Molly. At least I could get home and help Han with their tea, bath and bed.

            Out of Essex is a refreshing look at landscape through literary history that encourages us to refocus our perspective.

Filed Under: Book reviews Tagged With: , , ,

Book review: Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, The Nature of Language, by Scott Knickerbocker

March 4, 2013 By 9 Comments

Review by Em Strang

Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, The Nature of Language, Scott Knickerbocker, University of Massachusetts Press, 2012

ecopoeticsThis is an intense read. I can sense the long hours of writing and thinking that have been condensed into a couple of hundred pages. There is beauty in this book: ‘heightened perception promotes deep thinking’. There is loving patience: Knickerbocker devotes whole chapters to extensive close readings of the work of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur and Sylvia Plath. In his conclusion he focuses briefly on the work of contemporary African-American poet, Marilyn Nelson, the language poet, Susan Howe and New Formalist poet, John Witte, whose work experiments with the seeming paradox of free form – poetry that is written in free verse, but nonetheless has a specific pattern, shape and rhythm.

Knickerbocker is not discussing ecopoetry here but ecopoetics, a much broader concept of ‘thinking poetic ecologies’, of looking at the way in which poetic language and ecology might converge. This neatly side-steps the problems associated with ecopoetry -  is it political or phenomenological, or both? Is ecopoetry a term that only applies to contemporary poetry written against the backdrop of current ecological crisis, or can we redefine the work of John Clare, say, and William Wordsworth? None of these issues needs to be addressed in a book about ecopoetics, though I think the term has its own dilemmas: if we accept Knickerbocker’s choice of such a diverse selection of poets and their work as able to be considered ecopoetically, then it seems to me that every poem ever written can be considered in this way. Does this matter? By stretching the parameters of ecopoetics (if indeed there are any) as far as he does, does he render the term obsolete? How broad a programme is ecopoetics? And, more interestingly, what kind of political and cultural implications does such an all-encompassing sweep have?

Knickerbocker chooses not to clarify these issues, but instead focuses on what he calls ‘sensuous poesis’. Sensuous poesis is ‘the process of rematerializing language through sound effects and other formal devices as a sophisticated response to nonhuman nature’. In other words, he teases out the use of metaphor and aural correspondences (definitively not mimesis) to show how the work of his selected poets ‘performs the complexity, mystery, and beauty of nature rather than merely representing it.’ This crosses over, to a degree, with what Jonathan Bate discusses in The Song of the Earth (2000). Bate talks about ecopoetry ‘doing ecological work’ inasmuch as the poems – through their language and meaning – embody the experience of ‘dwelling’, a sense of belonging that ‘requires an attitude of sparing and preserving the world.’ Bate and Knickerbocker share territory in the way they see language doing ‘interconnective’ work, weaving a path between human and nonhuman. Where they diverge is in their specific angles: Knickerbocker stays exclusively with the artifice of language, establishing poetic artifice as interrelation with the natural world, while Bate focuses more on the phenomenological fruits of ecopoetic language.

Knickerbocker’s main departure from current ecocritical study in this field is in his suggestion that it’s possible to relate to nature through poetry, whilst avoiding the way most nature writers use language. This is a brave suggestion, but I’m not convinced that most nature writers write in a certain way, particularly when I think of the differences between the work of, say, Gary Snyder and the poets in Harriet Tarlo’s The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (2011). Or I open the pages of Entanglements: New Ecopoetry (2012) and discover what an eclectic mix of styles and language use there is in contemporary British, American, Canadian and Australian work. It seems a sloppy generalisation for such a tightly honed book.

In unpacking his brave suggestion, Knickerbocker explains that ‘rather than attempting to erase the artifice of their own poems, to make them seem more natural and thus supposedly closer to nature, the poets in this book unapologetically embrace artifice – not for its own sake but in order to perform and enact the natural world.’ He’s not suggesting the natural world is somehow artificial, rather that the so-called artificial constructs that poetry employs are as readily able to behave as nature behaves; that the more supposedly ‘organic’, free verse poetry is no closer to relating to nature than highly formalised verse, indeed may even be further away. He uses chaos theory to explain that nature is in fact more formalised than we may at first think, and that formal nature poetry, therefore, is more closely related to the natural world than non-formal, free verse poetry: ‘chaos theory today (sometimes termed ‘anti-chaos’) employs fractal geometry to show that what appear to be random occurrences and shapes in nature actually contain distinct patterns and surprising symmetries.’ I don’t disagree with the notion of formal chaos, but it’s at this point that I get a bit exasperated at the academic justification of his argument. To my mind, it’s OK to attempt to write towards nature either in free verse or radical verse or in über-complicated rondeau-redoublé. I think they all have limitations as well as surprising revelations to offer. I don’t really care whether one form is more ‘like nature’ than the other. Does anybody – apart from academics – worry about these things when reading Stevens, Bishop, Wilbur or Plath? OK, so this is an academic book written for an academic audience, but I always hope – especially when it comes to books about poetry – that the author might reach out to a broader readership (in the way Bate’s book does). I’m not being altogether fair here though: I’ve a growing aversion to the style of some academic texts.

Minor harrumph aside, there is something rather wonderful about this book which I only came to realise once I’d finished reading it. At times, I found the incredibly in-depth analysis of the poems tough-going, particularly in the chapter on Stevens, but Knickerbocker still does a really fine job of showing the reader how much he loves his subject. What I particularly liked about the book was that it seemed to me to be an invitation to slow reading, careful consideration and deep contemplation of the accomplished and beautifully crafted work of Stevens, Bishop, Wilbur and Plath. These are valuable invitations indeed.

Filed Under: Book reviews, Ecopoetry Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
« Older Posts
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 218 other followers

%d bloggers like this: