Originally from Belfast, Carolyn Jess-Cooke now is very much part of Glasgow’s vibrant literary scene; she comes to We Have to Leave the Earth with a considerable backdrop of lived, researched and written experience. Pleasingly, her website describes her as being ‘not really bothered about genre’. That’s useful as the evidence of her ability to work beyond boundaries is clear.

There are four distinct sections in this book (although the themes invade one another). Each section seems far bigger, far more important than the page count suggests; every section has the assurance of a full project, fit to make a free-standing pamphlet or collection. Short, yes, but completely realised.

There’s something very courageous about prefacing the first part, ‘Songs for the Arctic’ with the poem ‘Now’. In the deceptive ease of a domestic setting where

my daughter sleeps by the dog, and I write of them only
because the folding away of light gives a voice
to what cannot be stilled [.]

Immediately, the poet meshes the globally catastrophic with the intensely personal, recognising fears and identifying responsibilities.

The sequence of poems following this engage with ‘the serrated wastes, wolf-winter,/ flukkra incessant as loneliness,/light pared to a foil[.]’  (‘Confrontation’).The experience of that topography is conveyed directly, from the typographic shaping of the poems, many in uncompromising double-spacing where whitespace dominates the textual layers. It’s impossible not to feel the arduous nature of arctic exploration in these lines, which contrast with the compacted layout of a neighbouring poem expressing hopes, sailing in the safety of a fjord, or in the elegantly controlled symmetry of ‘The Queen Aboard the Oseberg.’ Vistas are cinematic, the details precise, and the languages used throughout are as cutting as they are musical. The research (both historical and drawn from contemporary studies on global warming) lays down the gauntlet without compromise. Bravely again, the poet draws from the personal in the global in the final poem of this extraordinary sequence.

The second grouping charts the parental experience of the emergence of autism, and its attendant diagnostic process. She maps the repeated suppression of those worst fears, the impossibility of burying them, the medical confirmation and the subsequent self-interrogation and fruitless examination of the family tree. Jess-Cooke tells it truly.

The fears you believe in – know – are
coiling around your heart, your lungs
building up a muscle
you don’t realise you have.
                                               (‘Things Will Work Out’)

These are far from graphic outspillings, and the poet’s formal care is as great as is it is in any other section of the book. However, as one who knows that territory well, my reaction was visceral. If a reader ever wants to understand how that time feels, they’ll find it described accurately in these startlingly beautiful poems.

The penultimate section’s nine poems, ‘The House of Rest’, celebrates the heroism of Josephine Butler. In a remarkable reaction to the accidental death of her own young daughter, Butler ‘threw herself into overturning the Contagious Diseases Act of 1869, which allowed any girl over the age of 13 to be forcibly subjected to a horrific medical examination of her cervix, and interned for up to a year, on mere suspicion of possessing venereal disease.’ (Notes). It’s a powerful read and ‘the only time/ the children are counted as treasure’ (Liverpool, 25th February, 1866), has prescient echoes as the US examines, or does not examine, its collective conscience on gun controls.

That final part pulls together strands, leaving that opening quotation entirely fulfilled. I cannot say enough about this significant collection. I can only urge you to read it.

That June, birdsong cleaved me
as rain splits drought, [.]
                                     (‘Birdsong for a Breakdown’)

Carolyn Jess-Cooke is a consummate author. Her writing, which has won numerous awards, has been published in twenty-three languages. We Have To Leave The Earth, Jess-Cooke’s third collection, epitomizes the innate skills within her poetry: vital energy, tenacity and verve.

This collection shakes a reader insistently by the shoulders, tenderly and with eloquent persistence. The introductory poem, ‘Now’, forces simultaneous focus on complete acknowledgement of the very moment of reading the poem, together with the poem’s conversational voice describing a familial scene. Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s poetry is masterly and never more so than when dealing with the universality of motherhood:

     Now is the moment I sit in bed on one hip,
     turned to the round mirror and the back of our daughter who now
     climbs into bed, pulling the covers haphazardly across us and
     the dog who snores lightly, …

This first poem creates a powerful hush, complete attentiveness and readiness for the journey. The first sequence, ‘Songs for the Arctic’, charts the northernmost region on Earth; inspired by the author’s own fieldwork there. Delicate white spacing in form is chosen for most poems here, evoking silence, isolation, snow and ice. The poet’s homage to the magnificence of this part of our planet begins with wonder and an air of trepidation:

     December. Bone sky.

     Ocean’s oil-dark

     cloth unsettled

     by a new burden: boat

     skirted with white

     mountains of many quarries

     and quiffs. We watch for

                    green sky-rivers

                    arrows of geese

                    water-scythes of whales

                                                        [‘We too flicker briefly’]

Natural beauty is clearly and adroitly wound like a silvery thread throughout the sequence, both in the lexis of a unique voice and tone which is curious and courageous. In the poem, ‘Confrontation,’ the poet asks with immediacy in the first line, ‘Why did you come?’ drawing a reader into what has gone before for explorers Amundsen and Shackleton, acknowledging with controlled defiance, ‘Death hides ¬¬– /but here I’m in the shiv/of his stare and he/in mine’

The poet’s physical outer journey and inner journey converge effortlessly in these poems. ‘Hammerfest Storm’ is sparse and sparing, each chosen word as precise as a shard of ice. ‘Risøyhamn’ (a poem whose title is the name of a village located on the southern part of the island of Andøya) chronicles a peaceful voyage:

     We sail, snail-slow, beneath
     a bridge knitting islands,
     its grey echo
     in the fjord
     unstitched as we pass,
     suturing in our wake.

But the calm before the storm is fiercely called out as a plea, almost a howl into an abyss:

     O that all rifts
     could be so healed.
     O that these seas
     never warm and rise but keep cool
     wind prised between
     bridge and tide.

Jess-Cooke is unafraid to name the realities of the climate crisis; her poetry directly and fearlessly confronts this in ‘Troms Vigil’:

     Mountain’s thousand
              flayed angles keep
     vigil for our dying earth,
              breaking her heart
     each winter, …

Political truths are recognised, too. ‘What We Found in the Arctic, or, the Geopolitics of New Natural Resources Uncovered by Melted Ice,’ is a list poem detailing explicitly the contents of its title, amongst them, ‘Rubber ducks’ ‘Three Incan children, sacrificed’ ‘1700 species of plants’ ‘The albedo effect, claimed by no one’ and:

     Polar bears, starving
     Coal
     Disputations concerning territorial waters
     45,000 Russian troops
     3,400 Russian military vehicles

This section of the book moves on to a poem entitled ‘The Edge of the Known World,’ where the poet asks:

                                        …What hunger
     will drive us yet, when I turn back
     to the world of Brexit, nuclear arms,
     Trump, islands of plastic, storms
     beyond record? How will we measure
     the cold? How will we see
     in the dark?

The final poem of the sequence pulls away from a darkly lit universe, old and new world orders and into the micro; the subject of this work being a tardigrade, a micro-animal with a macro reach which inhabits every part of the Earth’s biosphere. It is a pioneer species which fits into the sense of constant evolution that runs throughout this collection.

The next section contains a suite of deeply personal and deeply affecting pieces. The urgent title poem of the collection appears first and is astounding; an honest and forthright precis of why ‘We Have To Leave the Earth’. It demands to be read on the page in its entirety. Here, also, is a poem which recalls the poet’s grandmother-in-law’s horrific lived experience during the Brno Death March in 1945. There are also poems which sensitively navigate and soothe the desolate landscape of depression, ‘Sagittarius A*’ ‘Birdsong for a Breakdown’ and ‘Things Will Work Out.’ ‘Peeling the skin’ recollects sunburned family holidays:

     The confetti of my childhood lies in corners
     of Connemara, the sands of
     Donegal, bearing traces of fingers
     that picked me to riddance. I’d hear
     the sellotape-tear
     of strips they’d peel from my back
     and I felt like something being primed for the spit,
     or dressed for the rite.

Other poems include a beloved daughter’s diagnosis, each specific emotional twist and turn written with love and precision, ‘Pool’:

     You tell yourself that the facts are clear:
     autism is caused by genetics, or environment, and
     even if you were to travel back in time you
     could not have done anything, anything
     at all to prevent this –

‘At Sports Day’ prophetically details how the bond of love pulses into life-blood for the future and ‘Willow’s Leelo & Dave’ is a unique, stunningly beautiful poem:

     At school she’s started a craze
     for imaginary fish. All her friends suddenly
     have imaginary fish. This time last year
     the paediatrician said Willow didn’t engage
     in imaginary play, …

‘1 day old, 6.03am’ describes specifically this life-changing event. I cried when I first met this poem in a literary journal, and I cried upon reading again.

Jess-Cooke devotes and dedicates the next sequence of nine poems, ‘The House of Rest,’ to the memory of Josephine Butler; chronicling and honouring her life and work. My daughter completed her undergraduate years at Josephine Butler College; however, I knew little about Butler’s feminism and successful social reform in the Victorian era.

Boland once quoted Woolf: ‘For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.’ Jess-Cooke flips the reality of this upside down in acknowledgement of the fact; by breathing life, breathtakingly, into Butler’s history. Rather like colourising black and white or sepia photographs, the poet’s words revive Josephine Butler’s experiences and extraordinary pioneering, fleshing them out once again. This is history made strangely, often unnervingly, contemporary; in my opinion this sequence provides the pinnacle of this collection and is superb. Here is part of ‘Picking Oakum’:

              … But then my mind floods with Eva, each
      woman’s face a palimpsest of hers in reefs
     of shade, and the true purpose of my visit unfolds: if born

     under a different star my daughter might have found her way
     into this shed, into these lives, these pathways,
     these tendrils of too-used rope…

Poems in the final section bring us up to the present day. ‘Homeschooling’:

     Do I want to tell them their home is built
     on blood and bones? Do I want their
     childhood garden filled with teargas,
     Mace, a knee on the neck?

I feel privileged to have reviewed this collection. Should a paper label adorn this book, it would instruct us to read me, read me again and understand.

We Have to Leave the Earth is Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s third collection and her experience shows. She uses white space on the page like no one else, particularly in the opening sequence ‘Songs for the Arctic’. There’s not a word wasted in this section and each one is allowed a landing place with space around it, echoing the landscape she describes, as in ‘Hammerfest Storm’:

‘Sea working its tools

white hooks

shirring           wind

to a pelt                       the ship akilter’

The second section strikes a more personal note with poems about ancestors, parents, children and two of the best poems I have ever read about depression, ‘Sagittarius A*’ and ‘Birdsong for a Breakdown’: ‘Because I’d swum a thousand miles in tar/ upstream, and tar crept in my ears and ate the memory// of sound’.

‘The House of Rest’ is a sequence of poems based on the life of Josephine Butler, a feminist activist in the 19th century. These are deeply affecting poems which evoke the dreadful conditions for women at the time:

‘The matron shoves me into one of the ramshackle huts
outwith the workhouse,
her hands trembling as she turns the key in the lock.’ (Picking Oakum)

and ‘The Quiet Girls’:

‘children and women are forcibly subjected
to a brutal examination – bound, gagged, feet
in stirrups, metal speculum – in the name of
controlling venereal disease. Many have died;’

Butler was instrumental in overturning the Contagious Diseases Act of 1869 which allowed such barbaric examinations to take place and Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s poems bring Butler back into the light where she belongs.