Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Earth Songs is billed as “the first major anthology of contemporary eco-poetry”. It is a spin-off from Resurgence magazine, which itself has been described by the Guardian as “the spiritual and artistic flagship of the Green movement”, and is edited by the magazine’s poetry editor. It has 177 poems written in English (no translations) by living British, Irish and North American poets. If one wants an overview of how contemporary anglophone poets see the physical world and their place in it, this should be it.

The book has eight sections, each treating an aspect of humankind’s relations with the world, such as ‘The Living World’ about creatures and ‘Landscapes and Inscapes’ about physical and emotional scenery. Poems directly about the damage people are doing to the Earth are limited to one section, ‘Our Sick Planet’, so that the tone of the rest can be positive if not exactly optimistic.

Two sections don’t fulfil Abbs’ claim for them. He introduces one, ‘The Ecology of Love’, by referring to E O Wilson’s coinage biophilia, love of nature, and continues rather bizarrely “The poems in this chapter (sic) suggest that the best route to biophilia is the route of erotic love”. I was looking forward to poems about people falling in love with animals or trees, but in the actual poems the eroticism is very oblique and in some cases (Mother and Daughter by the North Sea, Three Sisters, Grandfather in the Garden) not
present at all.

Of the other section, ‘Weaving the Symbolic Web’, Abbs says that “one of the biological functions of poets is to secure the collective habitat by keeping alive, however subversively, the inherited symbols and myths”. Leaving aside the biological language and the defensiveness of “however subversively”, I believe that this is essentially true: without a capacity to respond to symbol and myth, something integral to the human imagination will die. The poems are said to be “vivid examples of this vital survival mechanism”, but I find them neither vivid nor subversive. Apart from some self-conscious evocations of classical and Celtic mythological figures, most of the poems celebrate famous paintings (Vermeer’s Woman Pouring Milk, Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow) or established cultural figures such as Descartes, Darwin, John Clare, Hölderlin and Turner (twice).

None of these poems transfigures our perception of the painting or person. One has only to compare the section’s first poem—Michael Woodward’s flat invocation of Oetzi, the Ice Age man found intact in an Alpine glacier in 1991—with Heaney’s The Tollund Man or Punishment to see what has gone wrong. Poets may, like Heaney, create new myths in response to their time and place or find new relevance in old myths, as in Hughes’ Tales from Ovid and Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife. What all of them do is insist on the importance of myth to readers now. At bottom, they seek to change the way people relate the present to the past.

The poems that Abbs has chosen for Earth Songs don’t do this, those in ‘Weaving the Symbolic Web’ more obviously than elsewhere. They present the natural world, and a narrow selection of cultural history, as sources of comfort, of solace, not challenge or renewal. They express the wish to be at peace in and with the world—perhaps the defining ambition of our time—as a matter of simple longing. Above all, they show no understanding that myths arise from and speak to human experience and that this is what makes them powerful, as in Heaney’s discovery that Bronze Age ritual victims can represent the sectarian killings (“slashed and dumped”) among which he lived or Duffy’s use of Mrs Lazarus to express horror that one may never be free of the dead.

The poems in Earth Songs achieve their comforting view of the world by a series of exclusions and evasions. First, it is a book from which people are almost totally excluded. The individual poets are present, of course, but they write exclusively about their own feelings. Other people—a loved one, a parent, a famous figure of the past—appear occasionally but (except in ‘Weaving the Symbolic Web’) always briefly and obliquely. Almost nowhere is a human relationship central to a poem nor, with two exceptions, the common experience of humankind. For example, several poems are about apples— the fruit, the tree, orchards—as symbols of love or paradise or, in Alice Oswald’s The Apple Shed, the soul:

    Ribston Pippin, Cox’s Orange,
    Woolbrook Russet, Sturmer Pippin,
    Bramley, Crispin, Margil, Spartan,
    Beauty of Bath and Merton Beauty…

    Put them bright in rows. Tell me
    what have our souls been growing all these years
    of time taken and rendered back as apples?

The problem is that this and the other poems treat the apple as given by nature, making not the slightest acknowledgement that it’s a human creation, the product of centuries of patient pollinating, grafting and pruning without which we would still have only crabapples. Fortunately the next poem, Angela Kirby’s Apple, shows what’s missing:

    Consider the demotic apple
    and its black seeds which just now
    I spat out into my hand—

    grown here in this city garden
    where ivy clasps a lichened tree
    of unknown lineage, it has

    nevertheless, and despite the scab,
    all the desired colour, taste and texture
    of an apple to commend it…

This has a different tone from everything else in the book. It accepts apples as a common (“demotic”) fruit with pips one spits out, refers without disparagement to the city (the few other poems that refer to city life portray it as corrupting or cruel) and sees beyond the scab to a fruit developed for human use:

    and see how, in my palm, the future
    lies, centuries of jellies, crumbles, pasties,
    aeons of tartes tatin, charlottes, pies…

This poem, of which I’ve quoted most, is realistic because it accepts common human experience as central. In the whole book it shares this quality only with Michael Donaghy’s Caliban’s Books, a subtle meditation on his father’s aspirations and delusions.

This lack of realism is also shown by most poems’ failure to engage closely with the experience they claim to describe. Of the poems about creatures, for example, none deals with carnivorousness, the mating urge or the violence of territoriality. In Earth Songs, creatures appear as distant, uncomplicated and admirable, as symbols of longing for a simpler freer life. But this inevitably involves evasion. One of the finest poems is Lynne Wycherley’s Bewick Swans Arrive at Ouse Washes which ends

    Altocirrus, the swans are as white
    as the tundra they come from.

    Their cries multiply. Their bodies
    crash-land on the water

    star after star after star.

The last line is dramatic but, on reflection, overstated and unconvincing. Stars are fiery entities and their impact would be devastating. One senses the poet reaching for a strong concluding image, however implausible. (And it is notable how many of the poems come to rest on archetypal images—light, the sun, stars, gold, the sea, dance, dream—which close the poem down resonantly but unarguably.) Poems like Wycherley’s lack a sense of the particularity, the detailed otherness, of living things such as is found in Les Murray’s Translations of the Natural World. His beetle, for example, speaks to us, utterly itself:

    I mated once, escaped a spider, ate things cooked
      in wet fires of decay
    but for the most part, was. I could not have put
      myself better…

Interestingly Murray sees the very otherness of creatures as evidence of God’s handiwork. Assuming that Australian poetry isn’t excluded (and Abbs doesn’t say that it is), I suspect that Abbs hasn’t  included any of Murray’s Translations because they would show up the emotional and poetic thinness of most of the rest.

To idealise the world is to risk falsifying it and a fair number of poets fall into this trap, misusing the resources of myth in various ways. There is Penelope Shuttle’s The Horse Who Loves Me and the anthropomorphic myth (animals are like us):

    The horse who loves me has no hobby but
      patience.
    He brings me the gift of his honesty.
    His big heart beats with love.
    Sometimes he openly seeks a wife. But he returns
      to me.

One notes the pun on hobby-horse and wonders about horses’ honesty, but “seeks a wife”? Horses are herd animals and stallions will instinctively mount any available mare. This isn’t the vatic exultation that Shuttle seeks, but adolescent coyness. A more serious dishonesty appears in Gillian Clarke’s Seals in Berlin which begins

    They cry in the city,
    their mouths the ‘O’s of children
    starving at their mother’s skirts.

and ascribes terrible suffering to the seals in Berlin Zoo—suffering of which, having observed them at length, I could see not the slightest evidence. This is a version of the animal rights myth: all animals suffer in captivity.

Evasion of a still more serious kind appears in Pauline Stainer’s Xochiquetzal which opens with an image of grim reality:

    The firefighters of Chernobyl
    lie naked
    on sloping beds
    in sterile rooms,
    without eyelashes
    or salivary glands…

One could respond to the horror of this in various ways—outrage, sympathy, grief, resolution that it must never happen again. It takes a particular kind of moral numbness to respond only with a mythic
image from another culture:

    o death
    take them lightly
    as the Colombian goddess
    who makes love
    to young warriors
    on the battlefield

    holding a butterfly
    between her lips.

This is the most extreme example of myth-assolace— a turning away from complex experience to the consolation of a myth not reworked, not rethought in any way, but merely lifted from elsewhere.

Evasion taints even the work of such a subtle and fastidious poet as David Constantine. His Endangered Species is a fine rapt description of a dawn walk in owl-haunted woods, but it begins

    No wonder we love the whales. Do they not carry
    Our warm blood below and we remember
    Falling asleep in a feeling element
    And our voices beating a musical way

    To a larger kindred, around the world?

This is both atavistic and sentimental—another version of animals-are-like-us. It privileges warmblooded creatures such as humans and whales as against fish, insects and reptiles, and it suggests that, in dreams, we can communicate over great distances, as whales do with their song. The poem’s ending is more explicit. Speaking of “Humans who harbour the dark in their open / Eyes all day”, Constantine writes that they are

    The ones not listening while the ruling voices
    Further impair our hearing. They are away
    With the owls, they ride the dreaming hooting hills
    Down, down, into an infinite pacific.

This is quietism in action, a turning away from resistance to the “ruling voices” through a dream of union with nature in an infinite peace. Constantine finally articulates what is wrong with Earth Songs. The poems are self-absorbed meditations on the poets’ feelings about the world without reference to reality. As such, they are intensely solipsistic. Dreaming is a recurrent theme and this is apt. Most of the poets write about the countryside, but their writing shows no physical or economic relationship with it. Work, for example, appears in none of the poems, nor does any hint of political commitment.

Earth Songs is evidently written by people who believe that human life will be improved if good people respond more fully to the natural world. This is a view with a long history. With William Morris and Thoreau, its most determined exponent was Rudolf Steiner whose life-long espousal of this belief stemmed from his editing of Goethe’s scientific writings in the 1880s. And this view is, of course, false. The condition of humanity has never been improved by personal contemplation alone, but only when contemplation has inspired or prepared for political action. To compare Steiner with Ghandi and Martin Luther King makes the point.

At a time when climate change, species massacre and genetic modification seem likely to run out of control, it would be good to see poets contemplating at least the possibility of political action—imagining the myths that might wake us from our selfabsorption, our dream that all will be well merely if we wish it.

The same lack of engagement with reality is apparent in Peter Abbs’ latest prose work, Against the Flow. This is billed as a polemic against the lack of creativity and authentic learning in the present education system, and I looked forward to a discussion of “the failure of most post-modernists to engage critically [Abbs’ italics] with some of the most urgent questions posed by global consumer culture”.

Alas, no such discussion takes place. The book is a hotchpotch of chapters—educational theory, literary criticism, art analysis, a collection of statements and aphorisms—which do not amount to an argument so much as illustrate Abbs’ underlying assumptions. These are not quite stated, but can be gleaned from comments like the following, from his explanation of why he has chosen only “three faces of wisdom”:

    I believe that wisdom has, in fact, many [Abbs’ italics] faces.   
    Though three is a sacred number, it is not meant to be definitive.

The sacredness of the number three is something not often found in serious works of cultural analysis and we gradually realise that Abbs is a mystic who believes that art is most profound when it responds to archetypes, that a modern work can “recreate anew the marks made in Paleolithic and Neolithic times”. These views are probably unhelpful to educationalists grappling with the Gradgrindism of current educational policy.

The two saddest things about the book are where, having inveighed against post-modernist dislocation, Abbs tries it himself: in his “Thirty-nine notes towards a new metaphysical poetry” which are entirely derivative (not only in their title—Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture and the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles) and in his prefacing each chapter with an autobiographical reminiscence. The most revealing of these is the last. Abbs and two others attempt to protest against the 1997 Turner Prizes and to demand the resignation of Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of the Tate Gallery. They are met by a line of bouncers who keep them on the pavement outside. Abbs childishly refers to “Sir Serota” throughout and plaintively comments:

    It was almost my first experience of public protest. I had not
    been brought up to demonstrate.

disgracefully blaming his parents for his lack of political will. His book and his anthology demonstrate the failure of quietism. Behind them lies a huge and urgent issue—whether the human imagination, our actual capacity to see the world differently, is being systematically stripped out by late capitalism—but neither gets past a fog of Steinerian mysticism to see it.