...This brings us in roundabout ways to Jane Lovell’s remarkable pamphlet This Tilting Earth, a pamphlet lit by her fascination with the fossil record and also with historical ones, and by biophilia (the title of one of the poems). I didn’t know the word. It means the urge to affiliate with other forms of life. I’m glad to have learned it. I took a chance on ‘reviewing’ this pamphlet, responding to a plea on Facebook. I’m so glad that I did. I read it first on the Supertram in Sheffield on my way to a Poetry Business Writing Day. It’s a good job the tram was almost empty. I found myself punching the air, and saying (under my breath, I hope, but I can’t be sure) YES!! YES!! I go on about Clive James’ dictum about ‘the moment that gets you in’. This slim pamphlet is packed with them. It does what Kim Moore said in that interview about "those solitary moments of reading, when you read a poem and put the book down because the poem is so good, because it has articulated something you didn’t know you felt".

Let me tell you about all the things that hauled me in, and then I’ll share a couple of the poems before insisting that you go out, at once, and buy the book.

First thing: the title. This Tilting Earth. I suppose this is personal. I seem to have been fascinated by the fact of the Earth’s tilted axis, without which we would have no seasons, for decades. I think it started with Ted Hughes:

     Brought to bare trees, to spike and shard

     browned by cold, our birds

     breast a homing departure; on wings press

     to correct earth’s sure tilt into darkness

                        ‘Nicholas Ferrer’ (Lupercal)

I spent a couple of hours yesterday trying to track it down. I’ve not consciously read this poem in 30 years. Why did that phrase stick? Why does it keep on popping up in poems as I write them? It comes uninvited, as in this from a poem of mine called ‘Viewpoint’.

Here, punctually, the earth rim tips up;

the sun’s disc eclipsed,

or this

     A moon is strange as it comes

     beyond the dark weight of hills

     and it is not rising

     but the huge world is toppling

     O so slow towards the moon

     in the dark ocean of the sky

For me it’s become an emblem of the accidents of our place in space and time, and simpler to hold in my mind than those that create our ideas of constellations like Orion or the Plough. The stability of that tilt relies on the gravity of the moon, which comes close and grows distant over huge spans of time. Our balance is so fragile. This tilting Earth; that word tilt is so exact, so layered. It seemed to me the perfect title.

What next: it was the range, archaeological, geographical, historical, of the poem’s titles that sent me googling. These poems will takes you to the mammoth burial sites of Siberia and North America ..the Laplev Sea, Lugoskoe, Waco; to the bay of Mont Saint-Michel and estuary of La Sélune; to the salt pans of Sečovlje in Slovenia; to the Hebridean ghost-crofts of Hirta; to Sithylemenkat Lake in the bowl of a gigantic meteor strike in the Yukon, and to Beringia that was the land bridge between Russia and America. You have no need to worry about the ‘facts’ behind the places. The poems tell you all you need to know about small significant extinctions; the thing is that they are precisely located, and this is important.

So much for names and titles. What about the moments that memorise themselves as you read? The collection is packed with them. As a whistlestop tour will show. How about the painted horses of the Lascaux caves, threatened by the very breath of visitors? "They watch us with their oilbloom eyes. / We breathe and they may disappear." Jane Lovell does brilliant opening lines, too, like these:

     They all ended up the same way, of course,

     deep in the silt and swirl of the Thames,

I love the insouciance of this, the crafty pronoun that starts it. And this, too: "He remembers, briefly, plummeting,/ tilting slowly like a tree."

Think about the way those two verbs apparently work against each other until you visualise a man falling from a height, and realise how exact it really is.

She has a wonderful eye for the moment, for the image, as in that of the carts in the salt pans “with their drapery of halite”. Drapery. Precise and true, as is her observation of

                  quiet pans of algae, gypsum, clay

     where egrets pick their way

     through cubes of sky

The moments aren’t just visual. There’s a memorable line in the salt pan poem that captures the idea that the suspension of sound is so profound that the salt worker "is listening to the voice / of the salt, the tinkering of the sea".

“Tinkering”. One of those moments when I said ‘YES’ on the tram. One of the delights of these poems is her easy use of a huge vocabulary that’s always being used for its rightness. And not just for their rightness, but for their textures: grume, squirl, laggy, skilly, candlenut, cinnabar. These are poems that demand to be read aloud and tasted. There are poets whose knowledge and erudition become exclusive. Jane Lovell’s not one of them. There may be arcane bits of information but the meaning’s always supplied by the context. Every living thing in these poems is brought to mind , enchanted, in Macfarlane’s sense, with a concrete textured clarity that becomes a praise poem for living things, and a reminder that like Blake she fervently believes that everything that lives is holy. I’m tempted to go on and on quoting. My review copy’s studded with underlinings and post-its. But you should have got the picture by now. I’d like to work my way through the poems. But one of the bits of advice I was given about doing a reading was that you should ‘leave them wanting more’. This Tilting Earth does precisely that, and so will I.

You can read the full review by John Foggin at www.writeoutloud.net.

The axial tilt of the earth ensures seasonal change. The ‘tilt’ examined in Jane Lovell’s poetry suggests other kinds of change – the contest between humanity and Nature and the ever-present danger of the fall. This Tilting Earth is an ethical call for the recognition of realised and threatened extinctions and the darkness of human neglect. In the closing lines of the first poem in the collection, ‘Song of the Vogelherd Horse’ we are offered a warning that combines command and lament:

I was here before your god.
Cherish my broken form.

This voice, of an ancient artefact that emerges from the earth at the behest of the elements, calls for serious attention to human and geological history and evidence. This opening poem also recognises the ethics and necessity of art and human making, for

the one who smoothed my lissome back,
that carried me against her skin;

serves as a contrast with

another who buried me in soil,                                      
stamped it down.

These 21 poems engage with evidence of loss in many forms. In the title poem (p.8) Lovell surveys the earth’s vulnerability through osteological remains from specific places (Sithylemenkat Lake, Lugovskoe, Waco, Beringia) and through them finds the devastations of famine, hunting/killing, drownings, the Ice Age. Here is archaeological evidence that echoes ‘two worlds’; the overwhelming chaos of ice in the earth’s history and the current threat of climate change. Destruction comes in moments, days, as well as epochs. It is personal, down to the level of each cell. Of the strange Ice Age mammals who were ‘still grazing’

Some say a howling darkness hurled them, bracing,
ice invading every cell and atom, to extinction;
the final gleam of frozen eyes ... (p.9)

The subjects of Lovell’s poems include the Victorian ethnographic artist who scrutinizes native Samoans;  the curiosities of Galapagos and the driven taxonomy and killing of living creatures. She shows us the tragedy of human scientific desire to understand and control, a desire that leaves the sought-after creatures extinct, their remains shut in exhibition cases:

see me everywhere you turn remember as you lift                                                
your glass, my tiny skull (p.19)

There are various subjects considered in This Tilting Earth about human behaviour, including how we disfigure and kill the wonderful (‘Armadillo’ p.20), how we make museum pieces of the remains of astonishing creatures (‘The Prayer of St Simon’ p.25). The ancient cave drawings of Limousin become symbols of our current tentative and poor stewardship of the natural world:

They watch us with oilbloom eyes.                                  
We breathe and they may disappear. (p.10)

This is poetry of the lost and disappeared that acknowledges nature as the ultimate force, above human endeavour and art, whether in ‘The Last Leap of Sam Patch’ (p.12) or ‘Clemency for the Drayman’, a poem that gives us a palpable sense of the creaturely, in spite of the ‘painted eye’:

It’s the lion we remember. Watch him catch the sun, the glint upon the river, the glint in his painted eye as the tide turns. (p.11)

In the conclusion to The Song of the Earth (Harvard University Press, 2000) Jonathon Bates presents Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘The Planet on The Table’ as a means of considering “whether you can accept that a poem is not only a making of a self and a making of the world, but also a response to the world and a respecting of the earth.”

Jane Lovell’s poems can be considered poems of this sort. This is a language of lament and ultimately of protest – an eco-poetry that seeks justice for the silent and wounded world.

These are fine, perceptive poems, carefully constructed – they invite return and deep consideration.

Jane Lovell’s latest pamphlet has an elegiac quality. She looks at a past studded with cruelty and sadness, documenting Man’s inhumanity and lack of care for their fellow creatures. Her words are carefully chosen, creating spare, clear and highly visual images of the scenes she describes and the people and animals she portrays, leading our imaginations to engage with a past made vivid and real.

From the outset, Lovell asks us to reflect on Man’s place in the universe. In 'The Song of the Vogelherd Horse' she takes us back to the creation of a beautiful artefact from 30,000 years ago. She imagines the early men who:

[…] smoothed my lissome back
that carried me against her skin;

another who buried me in soil,
em>stamped it down.
 
and reflecting on the passing centuries observes:
The gilding sun calls skies and hillsides
to my mind’s dark eye,
my spirit bones.

I was here before your god.
Cherish my broken form.

A similar preoccupation runs through 'Limousin, Lascaux' which focuses on the finds at the famous French cave, now closed to the public to protect its 17000 year old paintings. Lovell celebrates their creation:

Of charcoal, and cinnamon ochre,
umber burnt and blown through bone or reed,
they balance on mist, unwilling to tear the ghost-silk.

Lovell brings the vitality of the paintings to life:
Coats steam, tails flick, tongues lunge;
a stone sky rests on curled spears of ash, horns
of black manganese.
 

She finishes the poem with the irony that the beauty of the cave and its wonders attracted the visitors who would have marked its destruction:

We breathe and they may disappear.
 
Lovell examines a more recent loss to the animal world in Godolphin’s Stallion, the famous Arabian stud horse that was one of the founders of the modern thoroughbred. The horse is buried on the site of his stables near Cambridge. Lovell writes of:

[…] the sleeping giant, bones white as hazel,
Godolphin’s stallion shifts and twists
with the turning of the Earth […]

She pictures the ghost of the horse:

Late June, early mornings, some say,
they flinch at the thundering hooves, the salt
and stench of champed grass as the stallion passes,
eyes wild with triumph.
 
Lovell also focuses on the little told stories of less well-known people from history. 'The Last Leap of Sam Patch' chronicles the sad or possibly foolhardy end of the man known as The Jersey Jumper who found fame after jumping into the Niagara River at the falls. Patch jumped from a variety of buildings, bridges and platforms, and earning money from the audiences who gathered to watch his exploits. His jump at the Niagara Falls was watched by an audience of 10,000. His final jump, on Friday, November 13th 1829 was a 125 feet jump into the Genosee River with his pet bear. The jump went badly wrong, with Patch failing to make his usual feet first entry. Some bystanders suggested he may have had a little too much to drink. He never surfaced, and his body wasn’t found until the following spring when the frozen river thawed. He was 22. Lovell describes the leap:

He remembers, briefly, plummeting,
tilting slowly like a tree through stinging spray
to land amazed,
the last breath slammed from his lungs […]

Sam is dragged down river:

[…] hidden underwater
from the still-expectant crowd stamping at the frost,
the bitter light, he dreams of breathing.
 
Algae quietly invades his brain, bloom inside his bones.
 
The bear meets a similar fate:

Rats tumble past, bloated gourds of fur and cunning,
bellies full of bear-meat,
carrying in their eye-gleam the flash of the great canines
as the head lifted, rolled, then sank upon the flooded chest.
 
Lovell takes us through the daredevil madness of Sam Patch, and creates a vivid picture of what it must be like to drown in a bitterly cold river, describing how:

Winter stills the edge of the Genosee,
permeates his clothes, remaining skin, distending
every cavity, bursting every organ and capilliary.
 
He stares out through the long, cold water, eyes of a pike.
 
Lovell comments that Sam Patch’s epitaph reads:

“Here lies Sam Patch, the Yankee leaper
brave and mad and drowned.”

But the bear:

[…] snarled in his chain, was soon forgotten;
his carcass, bitten white as willow, never found.

Salt worker, Sečovlje remembers the generations of salt workers who have harvested salt from the lagoons in Slovenia for a millennium. Lovell puts us alongside a salt worker from the past, working the lagoons by hand. She creates a vivid image of the landscape:

                                            […] a land
brimming sea and salt blooms
above carpets of petola,
quiet pans of algae, gypsum, clay
where egrets pick their way
through cubes of sky.
 
Lovell describes the timeless continuum of salt production through generations of workers:

He does not move.
A rime of salt blisters his lips,
gathers in his desiccated bones.
 
Eight centuries of shift and hiss;
he closes his eyes,
balances against the light.

'Tallow' picks up the sense of historic industry with a vivid imagining of the soap making process from the rendering of fallen cattle to the mixing of tallow with the corrosive lye to produce tablets of soap.The poem opens with the boiling of a cow’s carcass:

Her eyes bleach the colour
of milk, head coming up blind
and turning.

Lovell goes on to describe the process: cooling the tallow, adding beeswax and lye:

stand back from its boiling and hissing,
do not breathe until it stills.

The end of the poem celebrates the selection of the animal chosen for rendering as a sacrifice:

It is light tonight, cloudless.
We carry her flesh to fire, break bread,
sing her name.
 
Tomorrow the women will roast the bones,
use the crushed chalk to make buttons
and beads.

and finally:

She was our chosen one, our beauty.

This is an exquisite collection of poems. Lovell brings the past to our attention with a vivid clarity. Every word is chosen with care, in this highly polished award-winning pamphlet.