Water was also a strong attraction and I felt calmed and comforted when I was on, in or near it. I swam in the sea, at the local lido, travelled to various island and coastal locations and took up a residency at a sustainability project on the Thames, spending the summer zipping past the Houses of Parliament on a RIB and sitting in the boat’s wheelhouse drafting poems in my notebook. Birds also flew in and out of the poems: free or caged, living or inanimate, real and imaginary.
Thinking about it now, this connection with the natural world makes sense. Having experienced a sudden and unexpected bereavement it felt like all the certainties I might have believed in (hospitals are a safe place to have a baby; midwives/doctors know what they’re doing; I will, finally, have a family etc…) were destabilised, if not obliterated. But the trees, the sea, a flock of birds, the moon: for me these things were part of a wider constellation, more profound and mysterious and interconnected than a human society that so often fails us; these animals and elements were a constant, they wouldn’t disappear.
Although of course, they are disappearing. In September a Zoological Society report revealed we’ve killed off half of the world’s wildlife in the past 40 years. Marine devastation is equally, if not more acute: as we empty the oceans of fish and sea life we are filling them with hazardous waste, plastic debris, endocrine disruptors and carcinogenic toxins. And thus, having written a book of elegies for my son, I realise that many of the poems in the book contextualize this acutely intimate trauma against a wider, more universal loss.
'The Last Sardine'
And now we’re hungry, it’s time to eat
and we don’t want shadows, sticks
and grass---we’d rather briny bacalao
or ling, some lumpfish caviar, perhaps
a hundred thousand tons of anchovies
an hour will keep us ticking over
until lunch, give us something salty
on the tongue, a squillion tiny pearls of roe,
a fin, a beak, some sacs of ink,
and when that’s done we’ll roast the gulls.
We may end up roasting the gulls, but there will be little point going to the beach to find them. Earlier this week I returned from a research trip to Lanzarote. (I am an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, where I’m investigating how hybrid poetic forms can be used to write about climate change.) I was there for Exxpeditionand specifically to meet 14 women who comprise the multi-disciplinary crew of Seadragon: a 72 ft yacht in which they will sail across the Atlantic through one of the five rubbish gyres to Martinique, gathering and analysing data on marine debris and the impact of plastics pollution. As a land-based member of the team I will syndicate their stories as they emerge and respond to their findings in my poetry and on my blog Natural Hybrid. Having been in the marina where the yacht was moored for six days, the seagulls were noticeable by their absence. I didn’t see one. Not until we went on a trip to the island’s waste management facility or rubbish dump as it is more commonly known.I wrote An Aviary of Small Birds because I had to tell a story that was bigger than me. It’s a book of poems because I’m interested in non-linear narratives and how we can relate them through emotional arcs and the lyric. Now I’m writing about the natural world because I want my poetry to bear witness to what’s happening and to do something, anything to provoke change, communicate political and ecological complexities and/or at least register my own protest. My son is not here to claim this inheritance, but if he were, I’d want what my generation passed on to be better than this.
Beach clean-up, Famara, Lanzarote with the Exxpedition crew. You can follow their story on Exxpedition.com or via my Twitter @KMcCarthyWoolf
Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to an English mother and a Jamaican father. She is the recipient of the Kate Betts Memorial Prize and an Arts and Humanities Research Council scholarship from Royal Holloway, where she is a PhD candidate. She is the editor of three literary anthologies, most recently Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe, 2014). Her poetry has been published in Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation among others.
mccarthywoolf.com
The Carcanet Blog Sale
With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off Karen McCarthy Woolf's An Aviary of Small Birds.
All books come with 10% off and and free delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk, so to claim your extra discount, use the code BLOG (case-sensitive). Happy reading!