This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Off the Hook’ by Carol Rumens from her collection De Chirico’s Threads, chosen by our new poetry editors Rhian Edwards and Zoë Brigley.
De Chirico’s Threads by Carol Rumens features an unusual centre-piece, a verse-play, fizzing with ideas and surrealist imagery, based on the life and work of the Italian painter Georges De Chirico, as well as distinctive and beautifully crafted individual poems by one of the UK’s best poets.
From 1st February, award-winning Welsh poets Zoë Brigley and Rhian Edwards are joining the Seren team as joint Poetry Editors.
Taking over from Amy Wack, who retired in October, Zoë and Rhian will be looking to discover new poets, especially in Wales, whilst continuing relationships with existing Seren poets.
On taking up the position, they said: “In the poetry publishing world, editorships are still mainly dominated by men. We are really glad to be continuing the tradition at Seren of offering a different perspective, publishing the best poetry from Wales and the rest of the UK. We are really looking forward to working with debut authors as well as championing the brilliant Seren poets already on our lists.”
Zoë Brigley has three PBS recommended poetry collections: The Secret, Conquest, and Hand & Skull (all from Bloodaxe), as well as several pamphlets and a non-fiction essay collection Notes from a Swing State (Parthian). She co-edited the anthology 100 Poems to Save the Earth with Kristian Evans and is editor of Poetry Wales.
Rhian Edwards is a winner of the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry. Her debut collection Clueless Dogs won Wales Book of the Year 2013 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2012. Her second collection The Estate Agent’s Daughter was published in 2020.
Zoë and Rhian will be working closely with the poets on Seren’s 2022 list which includes debut collections by Hannah Hodgson, Eric Ngalle Charles and Bryony Littlefair, two volumes of Collected Poems by Peter Finch, and new collections by Ben Wilkinson, Paul Henry, Hilary Llewellyn-Williams, Rhiannon Hooson and Judy Brown.
Publisher Mick Felton says: “The appointment of Zoë and Rhian as poetry editors marks a new era for Seren. They are ideally suited to maintaining the high standard of Seren’s poetry publishing and bring a wealth of experience, contacts and ideas to the position. We are excited to have them join the team and take Seren’s poetry list into a bright future.”
Sunday 23rd January is Sticky Toffee Pudding Day. As this month is also Veganuary, we wanted to re-share this indulgent Sticky Toffee Apple Pudding recipe from The Seasonal Vegan by Sarah Philpott. The perfect way to celebrate, especially when served with hot vanilla custard on a cold winter weekend.
The Seasonal Vegan is a kitchen diary of seasonal recipes with a delicious mixture of Sarah Philpott’s fine food writing and Manon Houston‘s beautiful photography. This guide to eating with the seasons takes a realistic approach to shopping cheaply and sustainably and proves that the vegan lifestyle is anything but expensive. Perfect for long-term vegans and novices alike.
– 250g dates – 100g soft brown sugar – 100g vegan butter, plus extra for greasing – 3 apples, grated – 300g self-raising flour – 2 tsp baking powder – 2 tsp ground allspice – A pinch of sea salt – 1 tsp vanilla extract – 1 tbsp treacle
For the sauce:
– 150g vegan butter, softened – 350g dark muscovado sugar – 1 tbsp black treacle – 50ml oat milk – 1 tsp vanilla extract – A pinch of sea salt
For the custard:
– 1 litre oat milk – 150g white sugar – 2 tsp vanilla extract – A pinch of sea salt – 1 tbsp cornflour – A pinch of turmeric (optional)
Preheat the oven to 180C. Put the dates in a bowl and pour over 250ml boiling water and leave for 10 minutes.
In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar together. Tip in the flour, baking powder, grated apple, allspice and salt and stir well. Add the vanilla extract and treacle and stir again.
Lightly grease a large dish or tin and pour the batter in, making sure to spread evenly. Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean.
Meanwhile, make the sauce by melting the butter, muscovado sugar and treacle over a very low heat in a heavy-based saucepan. Once the butter is melted, stir gently until everything else is melted too. Now stir in the oat milk, vanilla extract and salt, then turn up the heat and when it’s bubbling and hot, take it off the heat.
Take the pudding out of the oven and leave to stand for 20–30 minutes. To make the custard, put the oat milk, vanilla, salt and sugar in a small saucepan and heat over a medium heat, stirring constantly. Add the cornflour and bring to the boil. Keep stirring until you have a thick consistency, then add the turmeric, if using.
Pour the toffee sauce over the pudding and cut into eight slices. Pour over the custard and serve.
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Doxology’ by Dai George from his collection Karaoke King.
Dai George’s confident second collection Karaoke King, addresses the contentious nature of the times. Always deeply thoughtful but also alternately ebullient, angry, curious, ashamed, the poet moves through urban and digital spaces feeling both uneasy and exhilarated. There is a feeling of history shifting, as a younger generation confronts its ethical obligations, its sense of complicity and disappointment. Ecological crisis hovers in the background. Karaoke King also contains numerous reflections on popular culture, culminating in ‘A History of Jamaican Music’, a sequence at the heart of the volume speaking to urgent contemporary questions of ownership and privilege, pain and celebration.
This week’s Friday Poem is ‘21. When he tells me I’m not allowed’ by Kim Moore from All The Men I Never Married.
Kim Moore’s eagerly awaited second collection All The Men I Never Married is pointedly feminist, challenging and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities of desire. The 48 numbered poems take us through a gallery of exes and significant others where we encounter rage, pain, guilt, and love.
Following our previous guest post by Zoë Brigley on ecojustice, this week’s Friday Poem is ‘More Context Required’ by Vidyan Ravinthiran from 100 Poems to Save the Earth.
Our climate is on the brink of catastrophic change. 100 Poems to Save the Earth invites us to fine-tune our senses, to listen to the world around us, pay attention to what we have been missing. The defining crisis of our time is revealed to be fundamentally a crisis of perception. For too long, the earth has been exploited. With its incisive Foreword from editors Zoë Brigley and Kristian Evans, this landmark anthology is a call to action to fight the threat facing the only planet we have.
In this guest post Zoë Brigley, co-editor of landmark anthology 100 Poems to Save the Earth, looks at ecojustice – what it is, why it’s important – and talks about its place within the anthology and in poetry more widely.
Our climate is on the brink of catastrophic change. 100 Poems to Save the Earth invites us to fine-tune our senses, to listen to the world around us, pay attention to what we have been missing. The defining crisis of our time is revealed to be fundamentally a crisis of perception. For too long, the earth has been exploited. With its incisive Foreword from editors Zoë Brigley and Kristian Evans, this landmark anthology is a call to action to fight the threat facing the only planet we have.
What is Ecojustice?
After recently publishing 100 Poems to Save the Earthwith Kristian Evans, I received many questions about ecojustice. With resolutions for the new year being made, this felt like a good time to talk about why ecojustice is important, and to spotlight some of the poets from the anthology.
In basic terms, ecojustice links ecological movements to global social justice movements, a move which is necessary because sometimes environmental movements have been coopted by groups with racist or bigoted agendas. (See this article in The Guardian by Jeff Sparrow on eco-fascism). Ecojustice refuses environmental narratives based on restricting or blaming people with fewer privileges, but instead listens to the voices of social justice activists. Very often, groups with fewer privileges experience most acutely the deprivations and hardships caused by climate crisis. Environmental changes are already horribly real for populations in the Global South. There are also, however, more direct connections between the active oppression of groups with fewer privileges and environmental exploitation.
So social justice and climate justice are not two separate projects, and according to Raisa Foster and Rebecca A. Martusewicz, ‘Environmental and social impoverishment can be traced to the same deeply embedded cultural ways of thinking and being that our industrialized systems use and are created from’. Foster and Martusewicz hint at something that many writers have emphasized – see Wendy Wheeler in A New Modernity (1999). The Baconian, empirical worldview dominating Western thinking has also caused deep, intractable problems.
Foster and Martusewicz describe how dualism in ‘Western industrial society’ has dictated ‘where we locate value’ and ‘what we learn to identify as inherently inferior or superior’. They conclude: ‘Social and ecological violence is born in and maintained by this fundamentally violent hierarchical structure: culture–nature, mind–body, reason–emotion, man–woman, and civilized–savage’. Thinking in the context of Latin America – a contested site of some of the most biodiverse areas in the world, Verónica Schild suggests that dualistic thinking is inherent in a capitalist society, as capitalism seeks to extract value from sites of nature as well as poor women, both of which exist on the other side of a constructed binary. She also notes that many indigenous activists have already made the connection between the capitalist shaping of nature and the shaping of women’s lives. Although our anthology was mainly focused on writers from the UK and Ireland, we did give a flavour of writing from around the Anglophone world, including indigenous poets like Carter Revard, Gwen Nell Westerman, Craig Santos Perez, and Ellen van Neerven.
van Neerven is an award-winning writer and editor of Mununjali Yugambeh (Southeast Queensland) and Dutch heritage. van Neerven indicated in interview that her work has parallel themes that are ‘environmental’ and ‘anti-government.’ This comes together in van Neerven’s poems as, in Jeanine Leane’s words, ‘In this built-up and built-over environment the poet asserts the continuation of Aboriginal culture’ and ‘Australia is a nation imagined and constructed over many Aboriginal nations.’ Leane sees in van Neerven’s work the importance of ‘the role of women as gatherers of often small but essential items of food that sustain the clan – lizards, insects, bugs, berries, fruits, frogs, seeds, tubers’ but also ‘as gatherers and keepers of family histories, knowledge and secrets from Country that are handed down to nurture and sustain future generations.’
In 100 Poems to Save the Earth, we included ‘Love and Tradition,’ dedicated to van Neerven’s Aunty Nancy Bamaga. The poem is a prayer registering the danger of rising sea levels. Sparsely written, ‘Love and Tradition’ carefully maps out the problem while also calling on the wider community to recognise the effects on the indigenous community. van Neerven poses what Leane calls ‘the everyday activism that occurs in the Aboriginal home, differing from the more public or “loud” expressions of activism’ but posing ‘the home front as a sovereign space of nurture, growth and actualisation.’
There are many other poets in the anthology writing about ecojustice. For example, Ross Gay’s poem, ‘A Small Needful Fact,’ emphasizes the nurturing work of Eric Garner at the Parks and Rec, before he was killed in a racist murder by police. Kazim Ali in ‘Checkpoint’ emphasizes the pettiness of customs officials juxtaposed with portentous events in nature which seem to accuse humanity. The Cyborg Jillian Weise explores the body and nature in the context of disability, commenting on the hierarchies and judgements imposed on both. Sean Bonney’s ‘Our Death / What If the Summer Never Ends,’ Erin Robinsong’s ‘Late Prayer’ and many other poems in the anthology call out capitalism and its detrimental effects on nature and people.
Many poems speak of ecojustice in global terms. In interview with Nicholas Wroe, Welsh/Indian poet Tishani Doshi has commented on how transnationally, women often ‘have to navigate economic and environmental hostilities’. In Doshi’s work, concerns for women and for the environment mingle and jostle, and she also challenges the centrality of human beings over nature or the greater-than-human. In ‘Self’, the poem included in the anthology, there is an acknowledgement that the world does not necessarily need people. Also thinking on a global scale, Vidyan Ravinthiran’s ‘More Context Required’ seems to grapple with global circulation of information about climate crisis and social justice, which can’t be fathomed from ‘beautiful computer-generated maps.’ Other poems register how war creates disconnectedness from land and people, as populations are killed by remote control. Mir Mahfuz Ali comments on the violence of war in ‘MIG-21 at Shegontola,’ where a boy riding a bicycle seems to be the only survivor of an idyllic rural community destroyed by missiles.
Some poets speak from a spirit of hope in the face of climate and social injustice. Roger Robinson’s ‘A Portable Paradise’ turns to wisdom from his grandmother about rewilding ourselves – carrying a paradise within us in spite of injustices we may face. Registering awe of the greater-than-human, Carter Revard describes a happy afternoon as two Native boys explore nature in ‘Over by Fairfax, Leaving Tracks.’ The poem extends into networks of global capitalism, across time and space towards a profound thought about how nature might be preserved in our memory – if we survive.
What you won’t find in the anthology are moralizing or didactic poems for the simple reason that we don’t think they are very effective. As we suggest in the anthology introduction, poems that work through clichéd or even moralizing trains of thought can be easily dismissed. Poems that seek to make people – already feeling immense guilt about climate crisis – to feel even more guilty don’t help. People are moved to act far more out of inspiration, hope and – yes! – sometimes fear than out of guilt. What tends to happen more often with didactic writing is that people turn away and put their heads in the sand.
That doesn’t mean that these poems aren’t moving, inspiring, brilliant, or that they don’t work on the reader in significant and subtle ways to make those connections between damage to people and the environment. According to Foster and Martusewicz, ecojustice proceeds ‘from the fundamental acknowledgment that humans are utterly dependent upon a complex and diverse ecological system,’ and ‘damages to the ecological system are damages to ourselves’.
Foster, Raisa and Rebecca A. Martusewicz (2018) ‘Introduction.’ Art, EcoJustice, and Education: Intersecting Theories and Practices, ed. Raisa Foster, Jussi Mäkelä, and Rebecca A. Martusewicz. London: Routledge: pp 1-9 (p. 1, 3).
This article is based on a paper, ‘Justice, Ecologies, and Transnational Feminist Poetics: What Poetry Has to Say About Ecojustice’ given at the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) Convention this past October 2021. Thanks to the NWSA for including this paper.
Zoë Brigley is a poet and academic who has three PBS recommended poetry collections: The Secret (2007), Conquest (2012), and Hand & Skull (2019) (all from Bloodaxe). She has also published a collection of nonfiction essays Notes from a Swing State (Parthian 2019) and several chapbooks. She is Assistant Professor in English at the Ohio State University where she produces an anti-violence podcast: Sinister Myth. She won an Eric Gregory Award for the best British poets under 30, was Forward Prize commended, and listed in the Dylan Thomas Prize. She is the current editor of Poetry Wales Magazine.
