(Wastelands by Susie Campbell, published by Guillemot Press, 2025).
Q: Could you tell us about Wastelands?
A: Wastelands is my first full collection! It has been wonderful to work again with Guillemot Press who also published two of my pamphlets (Tenter in 2020 and The Sleeping Place in 2023). It’s probably fair to describe the book as ‘experimental’, as the collection is a hybrid of visual and text-based work. The book explores different kinds of ‘wasteland’ and the entanglement between inner and outer places of waste and depletion. My poetry uses formal strategies to respond to this entanglement, and to its states of loss and disorientation, and so reading (or listening to it) can require a bit of a gear change: meaning may be found in the patterning and textures of the language as much as in the everyday meanings of the words. Getting lost – and finding a new way to read or navigate – is, I hope, all part of the experience of reading Wastelands.
(‘Extract’ from ‘Hodening’ a visual poetry sequence about the making of a ritual pilgrim cap from waste carpet, feathers, plastic, bones and gold jewellery wire).
Q: What inspired it?
A: I have a confession! The book starts with the fall of a tree: a great, north-pointing tree brought down by Storm Eunice. This was a real-life ‘falling down’ which happened on the same day for me personally as a bereavement which left me lost and disorientated – and also, feeling guilty. A few days before the storm brought down the tree, I had tried to carry out a little poetic ritual involving lighting a candle and placing it in a hollow in the tree. It was foggy and wet, drizzling, so I hadn’t thought there was any risk, but I hadn’t bargained for the rotting wood which started to smoulder – I panicked and managed to put it out, but you can imagine my feelings of guilt when a few days later the whole tree came down!
So you could say this is what inspired the book. But it also has its roots in an ongoing project which began as an engagement with the Pilgrims’ Way. According to the Ordnance Survey map, the Pilgrims’ Way crosses through the Surrey Hills on its way from Winchester to Canterbury. In fact, this is largely mythological and due to the work of a Victorian OS surveyor who unified multiple pilgrim paths and ancient trackways into a single Pilgrim’s Way. This notional ‘old road’ is valued for its walks and its ‘heritage’ but as a result, everything else in the location, including its diverse networks of prehistoric pathways and sacred sites, is devalued as an empty ‘wasteland’. When I discovered literal waste, a landfill site, right at the heart of this landscape, I became interested in the whole process of allocating or stripping value from a place, a process which determines whether it is conserved as ‘heritage’ or made available for industrial exploitation, extraction, and landfill. The tree, whose falling I describe at the start of the book, was a wayfaring marker in this same landscape, and so questions about getting lost – and loss – also became an important part of the project.
Q: How did you go about developing this project?
A: I have written in some detail about the project’s developmental processes both on my own Substack blog and in an essay for Long Poem Magazine (autumn 2025 issue) on my poetic practice. If anyone is interested in the detail of how I drew on archaeological and archival practices for this project, I recommend these places for further reading. For the purposes of this piece, I will just talk about my fieldwork undertaken in collaboration with my dog Charlie. Charlie is a rescue dog who was abandoned on a rubbish dump as a newborn pup. As a result, he got very excited when we visited our local (closed) landfill site and he started to dig. Perhaps I should have stopped him, but when I realised he was digging up some waste textile from the ground, I helped him. Together we recovered some pieces of waste carpet which I took home, cleaned, and used as the basis for further creative work. The making of ritual objects and costumes from this literal waste helped me to develop the book’s ‘waste poetics’.
Q: How does Wastelands relate to your membership of Poets for the Planet and environmental activism?
A: The project challenges some of the traditional ways we conceptualise place – for example, using maps and the navigational compass (implicated in the exploitation of the world for trade and commodities), or through myths of emptiness and ‘wasteland’ (implicated in colonialism). It attempts to find new ways of mapping a place to include what is no longer there as well as what is still emergent. It also engages with how we think about waste. One of my poems begins with an epigraph from Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: ‘how would our patterns of consumption change if we faced not litter, rubbish, trash or ‘the recycling’, but an accumulating pile of lively and potentially dangerous matter?’ My poem sequence ‘Waste Poetics’ responds to this challenge by re-using language from the Environment Agency’s itemised lists of ‘permitted’ inert and containable landfill waste. ‘In my poem, this language is made to work rather differently!
lights blue and breathless through blown eggshells blaze into feasting and riotousness. Fruit rind and potato peel banish doubts when abundance is abandon and frenzied on the tongue, warm and softening or savouring what is mixed up and melting
(Extract from ‘Waste Poetics’)
Q: What was it like working again with Guillemot Press on this project?
A: I was so excited to have the opportunity to work with Guillemot on a full-length project! They did a wonderful job with my two earlier pamphlets which were illustrated by brilliant artist/archaeologist Rose Ferraby, and so I trusted that my collection would be in safe hands with them. Guillemot Press’s emphasis on materials and sustainability, and its passion for paper and beautiful design, makes it the perfect home for Wastelands. I was particularly thrilled with editor Luke Thompson’s choice of sustainable papers for the book, particularly the cover paper which is made from waste left over from chocolate making processes (you can see the little flecks of chocolate on the cover!) For me, this is all part of the poetry of Wastelands – not just poems in a book but the book itself as poetry, part of a material poetics.
Q: How can people get hold of a copy of Wastelands or hear you read?
A: The book can be ordered from the Guillemot website and there will also be links on the website to recordings of my readings. I have greatly enjoyed my launch readings since the book came out in September, but I hope to announce some more dates/venues for the new year. It may be of particular interest to Poets for the Planet that I am collaborating on a little series of readings on Waste in/as Literature with fiction writer/poet Andrea Mason (Waste Extractions) and ‘waste studies’ academic Rachele Dini. One of these readings will be scheduled for Earth Week in April at LCC (London College of Communications), details tba.