In place of an epigraph, this interesting collection offers definitions of ‘wild’ (‘‘woodlands,’ cf. Germanic ‘weald’’) and ‘wilder’ (‘obsolete verb, ‘to lose one’s way’, cf. ‘bewilder’’) that steer us firmly towards its themes: the environment and personal exploration. Such an ambit can encompass the travel lyric (Hong Kong, Orkney, Crete), responses to journalism and the arts (Chernobyl, Monet, Rodrigo, Tsvetaeva, Dante, Clampitt) and relationship poems, besides the more expected genres. In interviews, Jemma Borg expresses a biologist’s understanding of humans being ‘inside’ nature and suggests that this book wants – like much contemporary ecopoetry – to go beyond looking-and-naming towards a less othering engagement with ‘the world of which we are part’.
How to do that? Linguistically radical ecopoets, as readers here will know, see subject-verb-object structures themselves as part of the problem. Jemma Borg doesn’t get lost in those districts but does show attentiveness to questions of person. A drug (‘medicine’) experience poem moves from imperative to second to first plural to inveigle readerly complicity. The ego-deflecting ‘you’, with its unwillingness to take full ownership, is used in a good few poems, even in one about trying to ‘be wilder’, where its defensiveness is perhaps the point. In contrast, the direct ‘I’ in the poems of pregnancy, childbirth and early motherhood offers unreserved and powerful intimacy: ‘They staple me shut with wire’; ‘when I tried to stand, I split from hip to hip’. Connection here, anyhow, is incarnate.
As for the syntactic filigree, well, some similes: ‘lightning sharp as sherbet’; ‘blue sky cracked open like an egg’; ‘the rain washed us out like pots’. Metaphors: ‘have you ridden the word-scent/ into the caverns of your body’; ‘even our thoughts seemed to wear old blood’. And creative collocations, tending to appear in adjective-noun-genitive bundles: ‘the slender gulp of the sea’; ‘the drowned accuracy of the coast’; ‘the old lake of the heart’; ‘the blackened theatre of my skin’; ‘the drunken gift of your life’… If you went ‘oooh’ at those examples, great; if you eye-rolled then this collection’s probably not for you. The risk (as critics like to call it) of far-fetched figurative language is that closer up it can resolve into nonsense. Too much of it can feel more like display behaviour than convergence. It’s justified here, I guess, as part of a valorisation of the wild and messy; whether or not you buy that, it’s still hard to resist many lovely moments: ‘the soundless doors/ of her wings’ of a butterfly or the suburban wife ‘bored as a parked car’.
For the rest, breadth of sympathy is shown by an attention to unpopular facets of nature – aphids, a pine plantation, the marsh thistle. Using spacing in place of full stops stands, I suppose, for provisionality or openness. Traditional nature-poetry imagery of roots and growth interacts with ecocrisis motifs of grief, wounds and rivers of blood. Jaguars and sequoias offer the global perspective, while poems set around Tunbridge Wells and The Weald provide the local – besides indicating that Jemma Borg is another of that talented poet-cluster (Wicks, Bergman, Mookherjee) based there. Sometimes the voices even ‘risk’ sententiae, especially at endings: ‘Find where the soil is/ in you still’; ‘it’s not possible to lie/ when you speak out of the body’s mine’.
But if its non-othering strategies are in beta-test, it’s hard to fault the collection’s heart, attention, heterogeneity and, not least, willingness to acknowledge the horrors to come. ‘That noise,’ says one character of a calving ice shelf, ‘is the end of the world.’ ‘I see/ grief everywhere’, the final speaker admits, before the word ‘hope’ materialises like a deus ex machina.
Guy Russell 18th February 2024
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