A timely new book for 2023 for you to consider.
Signals from the Other is award-winning poet, Jennie Osborne’s third full collection and is published by Dempsey & Windle’s Vole Imprint. This is a courageous and powerful exploration of the natural world signalling its vulnerability during the ongoing ecological crisis. These are virtuoso poems of warning, urging us to respond to the signals that are all around us, ‘listening to everything we don’t want to hear’ (Kindling). This book’s task is to make us fully realise that humans have all but destroyed this beautiful planet. Her wonderful choice of cover seems to illustrate the interweaving and connectedness of all things.
And yet despite the ecological lament, Osborne marvellously depicts all this beauty with such a fine ear for striking each coup de grace.Her sophisticated poetic skills lift our spirits in poems that draw our elemental selves out into the landscapes of moor, forest and seashore. In Rebellion her words joyously tumble over themselves because even in cities:
… in orchards and gardens beyond,
the healing herbs, berry bushes,
and peartrees sending their fruit –
in every open space, every town centre
they’re flowering in solidarity,
clematis clinging on, geraniums
making a statement, even
under the hedges, a host
of violets quietly clicking send.
In What’s Wrong with Spring? the poet starts
I held to spring like a lifebelt
each primrose each snowdrop
a necessary message from the future
that I would come through
And compares this idyll with how things are because now we have shrinking woodlands fields going down / under armies of houses
Osborne has sometimes used paintings as inspiration and A Morrigan for our Times is based on a painting by Josie Gould. Mythical and raw this short poem imagines an angry war goddess standing astride a landscape knowing she can only fail… as the soil under her soles/crumbles into mad-eyed ocean. The poem’s power is compressed and tense just as it transforms the paint on the paper into poetry.
Wateriness and weather are also the focus of Saltmarsh, lyrically evoked:
no place for maps the marsh re-writes itself
with every season every wash of tide
nothing stays long banks shift the river rises year
on year this is a place in transit
going gone
The lack of punctuation and the white spaces deftly reflect the insecure boggy groundlessness, line endings deliberately hesitate, words echo one another conjuring the fragile changeability, the two words of the last line introducing an emphatic and different note.
Adept at using scientific terms, Osborne mixes this vocabulary with her musical and alliterative
lyricism. In Gaia No Longer Remembers Herself she writes:
Now breath is clot and stoppered
her every surface slimed
with unliving
She can’t remember the light
the dance of photosynthesis and transpiration
Almost she has gone under
These poems both frighten and hypnotise, bearing witness to the ongoing ecological crisis through the lives of an otter tail hinting at eel/forepaws suggesting fins…. eyes peat-dark/pools; the tender curve of a stag’s throat; a dormouse guarding no nut called spring in my imaginings/ no hope it might sprout/unblighted; a displaced sparrow is bustled by hustle/trollied and clanged/tangled in jangle , a performing dolphin is condemned to swim round and round in dead water. These creatures are realised in tightly drawn sketches, the detail adding deeply- felt colour to the collection.
This is a poet that energetically inhabits other beings, gives a voice to the voiceless and thus resurrects a sunken forest that once stood on a shoreline. In Once We Were Forests the (long-dead) trees sing their own unpunctuated elegy, the words appearing to ripple under the lapping water:
and we were communities
our bodies insect highways
….
and we were one in many many in one
look at the sand
see where a tide has left our image in sepia relief
Osborne even brings an imaginary granddaughter to life so that we, too, visualise this child in this tender and vivid portrait. She speaks affectionately to the child, asks her to imagine your pet cat (you’ll have one of you can I’m sure) and for whom she’d like to paint those buzzing engines of pollination we called bees. (I note that telling use of past tense.) Subverting our expectations Granddaughter ends:
I’m glad you won’t be here, on this trashed world
to sweat as it heats up, as friendly air runs out.
The book ends with How It Will Be an epic, almost biblical prophecy of doom delivered in a spare, unpunctuated poem of short lines that unashamedly shows us images of the consequences of mankind’s unfettered greed and grime:
this demented sun
smearing the tired
gasp of a smothered sea
You can hear Jennie Osborne reading her poems here on West Wilts Radio
Rebecca Gethin 