This is going to be a kind of rambling discussion related to my recent experiences of reading Irish poetry. I am currently part way through on MA module on Irish poetry, which has thus far been interesting, but also frustrating because the focus is on canonical poets like MacNeice, Heaney, Kavanagh, with very little discussion of modernism or what would later be termed ‘linguistically innovative poetry’. I really cannot remember the exact date of my interest in modernist poetry but if I had to guess it must have been around the time of my last year at Edge Hill University. Funnily enough Robert Sheppard is the director of the creative writing programme at that same university and is a card-carrying member of the British underground poetry scene. It must also have been around this time that I discovered the poetry of George Mackay Brown, who I found out was my tutor’s favourite writer by looking at his blog online. And thinking about it, it was probably not long after I discovered Geo
Cleave: a short review my five year son who said “I’ll get you for this” has written ‘fuck off’ in red ink across his tiny chest Cleave is a fascinating collection by Devonshire poet Nicholas Johnson, first published in 2002 and revised in 2013 it is a attempt to respond to (or is it document?) the foot and mouth crisis, the first agricultural plague of 21st century Europe. The poems in the collection are by turns beautiful and unsettling, comforting and bleak. Meg Bateman’s preface does a good job of introducing the context for the collection. At the heart of the poems here is the poet’s horror at the abhorrent culling of farm animals and the damage we have done to the landscape, and how these horrors contaminate even our relations with each other. The poems here attest to poetry’s ability to speak to environmental crisis in a meaningful way, bringing to the fore moral dilemmas that arise from human exploitation of the natural resources. Bateman suggests that the question at t