Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from January, 2021

Nicholas Johnson, Cleave, 2013

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...