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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 question at the centre of Johnson’s poetic is “whether we can retrieve our wonder at life from land that has absorbed the blood of wastefully slaughtered animals and the residue of the tyres, cordite and paraffin that aided their burning. We have marginalised animal life as industry and made it disgusting.” The very last poem in the collection “The Stars Have Broken in Pieces” is also the best one and captures most dramatically the slaughter of livestock whilst also combining biblical, folk and scientific idioms. The poem ends on a quietly apocalyptic note:

 

They say the dead do not speak out; nor do they

move on as they pick against the petals

on railings. I have heard the trucks reversing

 

I hear the lorries turn, their stalls gleam

with blood below the yellow helicopters and gallivant birds,

it is finally true, candles have burned right down.

 

Quite where Johnson fits in with the larger concerns of ecologically aware poetry I don’t know. Johnson’s ire seems to be directed at the state and the industrial CEOs responsible for the large scale culling of farm animals in order to halt the spread of a virus that is only fatal to adult cattle in very rare cases. The title of the collection, as Johnson points out in a prose interlude halfway through the collection, means both to cut, to sunder, to split (i.e. a butcher’s cleaver) and also to cling to something, to adhere or hold to something or someone. Of course the cloven hoofs of cattle are also sugested. But this double meaning, as Bateman again points out, hints at the moral dilemma of Cleave: is nature just a thing to be cleaved for its natural resources, or is it something we need to cleave to?

Cleave is published by Waterloo Press and more of Johnson's work can be found at Etruscan Books along with work by other equally brilliant poets.

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