During the recent lockdown period, an unusual submissions call went out. It was a call for contributions to a Rewilding anthology, the Crested Tit Collective’s latest poetry project. It was clear from the outset, this would be no conventional poetry anthology. Entries were invited in any creative form suitable for print publication and this commitment to innovation, diversity and inclusiveness is apparent right from the start. The anthology’s ‘Introduction’ offers the reader dozens of possible responses to the prompt ‘Rewilding is’, and the dedication gestures to a wide inclusivity: ‘To the trees, the seas, the soil, the birds, the ice, the clouds, the flowers, the amphibians, the rivers, the weeds, the mammals, the rocks, the sand, the hills, the pebbles, the fish, the mountains, the deserts, the islands, the insects, the heather, the reptiles, the grasses, the tides, the mist, the valleys, the lakes, the, the, the’.
By way of an extended introduction, the opening pages of the anthology offer contributions from some of the Crested Tits themselves. Members of the collective echo and respond to each other’s work, offering us and each other disruptions (the term is taken from E.P Jenkins’ four ‘Disruptions’), interventions and experiments with the page itself, and establishing a reading expectation….not to have any expectations! Anything might happen in this volume which ‘rewilds’ the conventional conception of what a poetry anthology might look like. Words, pictures, diagrams and collaged elements traverse the pages in any direction, top to bottom, side to side, upside down or in a circle. The logical, orderly progression of individual poems conventionally found in anthologies has been allowed to run riot; any neat or orderly division into sections or themes has been overrun by an art-wilderness, which includes unexpected, beautiful or dangerous discoveries on every page.
Perhaps surprisingly, the very first piece seems to be more concerned with the digital environment than the so-called ‘natural environment. But on closer reading, it quickly becomes apparent that separating the virtual and the ‘real’ is just one of the many reductive binaries and polarities deconstructed by the anthology. Chloë Proctor’s ‘Digital Bionts’ is a multi-media poem based on the poet’s experimental introduction of a ‘sporesbot’ into the ‘twittersphere’. Proctor tells us that her ‘bot’ is a reformatting of an earlier, related project to engineer ‘holobionts’, using recognisable grammatical ‘connectives’ to combine unfamiliar words from biology and botany into plausible semantic units. By broadcasting its ‘spores’ on social media, she demonstrates how this ‘bot’ is able to disrupt and ‘rewild’ digital space. The digital environment, it appears, is not hermetically sealed and cut off from other environments but emmeshed with them. The decision to make this the first piece in the anthology is significant, given the book’s emergence during a pandemic and the fact that lockdown has meant many people have been isolated from each other and the environment. Digital access has become a predominant means for many to engage with ‘nature’. In their recent interview for Poets for the Planet the Crested Tit Collective made it clear how much this was part of their intention. As they embarked on the Rewilding project, they realised how during lockdown many people would only be able to engage with the environment digitally or locally and so they committed to an exploration of ‘ the possibility of ‘rewilding’ the site of the home, the town, the city: the spaces of isolation’.
In addition to the introductory pieces by members of the Crested Tit Collective, a further contribution from the collective rounds off the anthology. ‘Speculative Futures’ is part-manifesto, part-elegy, part-poem. It came out of a digital discussion between the Tits on 8th June 2020 about the speculative manifesto/documentation/poetics of the future each hoped for. The resulting collaborative or ‘collective’ piece covers politics, economics and inequalities as well as poetics but what emerges most strongly from this collective document is a key question, or series of questions: is it actually possible to think about a future, or can an ecopoetry anthology be only an elegy? Is it only those in a privileged position who can think about the future, given the fact that many have already lost their futures to the catastrophic impacts of climate change, environmental abuse and the pandemic? Acknowledging this privilege, who can or should take part in the work of future-building? How can marginalised or silenced voices be part of that future-building? The collective manifesto moves through doubt, questioning and grief to a choice: a commitment to a very open position of ‘Yes, and…’.
It seems to me that these are the questions that hang over the book as a whole. The Rewilding anthology, in various ways, attempts to engage with the possibility of a future, of the need to challenge and change privilege as well as with vital questions about how a future might arrive.
It is certainly true that a sense of crisis and loss dominates many of the pieces. It is very evident that this is an anthology made during a time of pandemic. Discarded blue masks litter many of the pages. A uneasy sense of teetering on the edge of disaster pervades Aaron Kent’s haunting ‘Rise Balance Rise’ while the grief and rage of a tragedy that has already struck are memorialised in Josh Allsop’s ‘Five memories of an oil spill’ and Pratyusha’s ‘Forest Lament’. Loss and alienation are given voice in C.T. Mills’ ‘Hireath’, in which the ‘longing for a home you can’t go back to, or that never was’ is boxed in by the poem’s use of sharp, slanting marks //. Richard Carter’s ‘Orbital Reveries’ combines text, image and aerial photograph to confront us with the reality of the ‘greenhouse’ effect. Ariana Benson’s ‘Processional at the Earth’s Funeral’ laments ‘so you are only beautiful to them now that you are gone’. But even while this anthology rages and mourns, it still grapples with how change might be brought about and primarily, as this is a poetry anthology, with the role of language in that change.
Many of the pieces in the anthology demand a new way of reading, suggesting that conventional ways of reading and writing are all too often implicated in old, exploitative ways of regarding the environment. Many of the pieces use visual design, combination of image and text or new ways of generating poetic text to challenge the ways we engage with language. Allen Fisher’s ‘Trees 200406-2000506’ is composed from a catalogue of proposed ‘works’ (felling) to a number of trees and demands a cumulative kind of reading where progression is replaced first by the numbing effect of this impersonal list and then accumulates to a particular questioning horror in the reader. Faye Latham’s ‘Table 1: Flora and Fauna’ is another example of a number of pieces which make poetry out of the way data is presented, challenging the ways in which the environment is striated and controlled by being broken down into ‘information’. More optimistically, Kendrick Loo’s ‘Dendrology of a Boy’ creates a new vocabulary that appears almost like new leaves or fruit on a tree, a vocabulary that is highly suggestive of tree-climbing excursions and, in its reliance on new-forged words – ‘crownclimb’, ‘stilllight’ – hints at the possibility of new, more benign connections between the human, the animal and the natural environment. Nic Stringer’s ‘Chain’ (daisy-chain?), like a number of pieces in the anthology, combines image and text to demand an active, exploratory reading. Michaël Vidon’s ‘Barley and Me’ encourages the reader to read in different directions including down the ‘gully’ between parts of the text and Karen Sandhu’s wonderfully-named ‘Paul Gauguin Goes for Walks in the Park Behind My House’ teases us to follow the line/s that literally wander through the words of her text.
Recycling or ‘salvaging’ text is another approach that characterises a number of the pieces in this anthology. Many of the poets represented here engage with language domains beyond the typically poetic, or combine textual and non-textual elements, reminding us of the involvement of the human in the ‘natural’ world. We are asked to rethink that that involvement, whilst also contemplating the correspondences and connections between human and non-human organisation. Christina Riley ‘s ‘The Beach Today’, ‘Barassie’ and ‘Curlew’ offer us organised patterns of ‘natural’ images, shells and feathers almost forming an ‘asemic’ alphabet in their framed orderliness. Yvonne Litschel’s ‘floral mimicry subtypes in humans’ breaks down the opposition of flower shapes and letter shapes in while Astra Papachristodoulou’s ‘Artificial Honeycomb’ invites to contemplate the combination of ‘human-made’ comb and textual shapes.
As we might expect in an ‘ecopoetic anthology’, many of the pieces engage with ideas about place or explore specific sites but with a commitment to looking at global spaces and avoiding traditional or simplistic distinctions between urban and rural spaces. Tese Uhomoibhi ‘s piece ‘The Forest Project’ is part performance log, part ritual, as it details site specific recordings made in New England, Germany, Nigeria, Brazil, Wales and England. Its instructions on how to transcribe sounds into notes and words, or how to collect forest-samples, are put increasingly under pressure throughout the piece so that we are not sure whether this is a ritual for a rewilding or a final attempt to record the dying and disappearing forest, a last rite for its passing. Richard Capener’s ‘the isn’t city no place to pass time in’ takes an anti-pastoral look at the countryside as a transgressive ‘isn’t city’. The anthology combines a sensitivity to the local and specific (in pieces such as Laura Hellon’s ‘For Ennerdale’ or Sarah Westcott’s ‘Plim’, its footnotes almost like a field-guide) with a simultaneous awareness that the global is a vital context for the local. Issues of colonialism, racism and economic exploitation are a vital part of this anthology’s ecopoetic engagement. Tanicia Pratt’s ‘Da Zooxanthellae Like Who?’ deconstructs and scatters its text across the page as it narrates ‘the (de)constructing of coral and algae’ and the impact of neo-colonialism on the Bahamas through the tourism industry. Robert Hampson’s ‘Lockdown Ode: A Planetary Testimony’ includes one of the anthology’s most resonant vignettes: ‘huddled over in my anniversary t-shirt/ studying the uncertain map of the planet/ as a private-equity acquisition’.
The anthology includes many examples of stunning visual poetry where the page itself is explored an environment. Just some of these are the gorgeous asemic and textual shapes in Briony Hughes’ ‘Rhizomes’, the ‘water collages’ of J.D. Howse’s ‘As I Listen to the Water’ and the delicate leaf and bark work of Kate Siklosi’s ‘Object Poems’. In an anthology that includes so many stunning visual pieces, it is perhaps invidious to identify only some by name – if this were a longer review, there would be something to say about all of these pieces – but I am going to pick out the work of Aoife Higgins for mention as she is also the cover artist. Her stitched, fold-out pieces (‘Measuring’) are part-book, part-collage, part-puzzle, suggesting perhaps ways in which the reader might approach this anthology. But her piece also resonated for me with the infamous Mercator projection, suggesting in Higgins’ stitching and folding, how the Mercator flattenings and distortions might be imaginatively re-visioned and re-constructed.
The anthology’s concern with diverse voices and re-imagining the relationship between the human and the environment extends to exploring the connections between bodies and the way we experience or represent the natural world. The presence of a pandemic intrudes across a number of the poems. Cat Chong’s ‘ – I’m writing my way out – and this is a place of refuge -‘ circles around the refrain ‘I am a crip of the covid century’ as it uses an extended hyphen or dash to gesture to the connections, or circuits, that may need to be acknowledged in order to be broken and remade. Sarah Cave’s ‘Meditations on Desire Paths’ is divided into #5 ‘queer footsteps’ sections for its profound contemplation of a ‘re-enchantment’, where re-enchantment seems to stand for a ‘re-naming’, new ways of imagining the connection of language with a world beyond language. Kat Payne Ware’s ‘BOBBY’ graphically explores the idea of holes in the (female/mother’s) body and the attempt to codify and control them. Caroline Harris’s ‘From Cut-Out Bambi’ explores ‘cuteness’ to ‘decentre, disrupt and destabilise the human gaze and its reflection’. One of the most thought-provoking pieces in the anthology, Karen Jane Cannon’s ‘Sightlines: Disrupting the Nature Narrative’ explores sight loss as the basis for a new way of looking, and challenges the way that, all too often, ‘[n]ature writing comes with the assumption that all vision is the same.’ She challenges the able-bodied assumptions of much eco-practice and writing, advocating instead ‘a nature narrative of connectivity, a writing of between the cracks, a sensory exploration of landscape, a hunkering down, a being part of instead of moving through’.
There are many other exciting and provocative pieces in this anthology that I could discuss but perhaps it is better to leave the process of discovery to the reader. I am aware that, by teasing out certain themes or strands for this review, I have already imposed a rather more reductive way of reading than this complex anthology calls for. Its strands weave in and out of a multitude of eco-poetries to suggest that it is in the vital interrelatedness and plural imaginings of this anthology that we may begin to find the answers to those crucial questions about future-building posed in the ‘Speculative Futures’ manifesto. What also emerges from this anthology is a commitment to experimental and innovative poetries as part of this future-building, a belief that only by re-imagining language and the way humans view and connect with the environment is there any kind of hope for a future.
Rewilding is due to published in the second week of November, 2020. There will be a free digital resource upload available with the anthology to encourage readers to make meaningful use of what they take from the book. Pre-orders will be announced on their twitter account.