Editorial

Open though written in confinement, conversing though written in isolation,
the poems in this issue invert and channel the drawn-out difficulties of writing
in lockdown, both responding to them directly and responding to them by not
responding to them.

Nasim Luczaj gives us her take in ‘Break’, when she writes: ‘i’m rested like
a colour | observe every tremor | of a poem as it falls | off the roof |
and breaks its spine.’ Out-of-body, hyperaware, strained, the lines even
titter slightly with the self-deprecating dark humour that I detected creeping
into my own writ- ing and conversations with others writing poetry over the
winter months. The poem itself doesn’t do this of course. If anything, along
with the rest of the work in the issue, it’s a sure sign that poetry’s still
stepping off rooftops, sprouting wings, and flapping cloudward, never mind
the unaerodynamic conditions under which it’s been composed.

Birds in flight are, unsurprisingly, the prominent living symbol that
migrates through these pages, both as image and vocal inflection.
And we’re glad to have it that way. When the speaker in Maria
Sledmere’s ‘Evangeline’ exclaims ‘of course the skylarks look like
skylarks,’ seemingly emerging from the textual and abstract into the
tangible and real, I was reminded of the way my first proper encounter with
lots of species of bird was in poetry (Elizabeth Bishop’s sandpiper, Roddy
Lumsden’s hoopoe, Hopkins’s kingfisher) and recognising them in vivo
came a much later second. Partly this gave them special prominence but
it also made vocabularies available with which to enrich their hard
and fast taxonomies.

Beyond birds, the poems in the issue invite us to take our relationship
to and treatment of non-human beings seriously, posing questions about
their role in metaphor and lore as well as the everyday. Richard Price’s
‘The Old Woman Who Changed Herself Into A Man’ for example, a retelling
of an Inuit folktale from The Owner of the Sea (published by Carcanet
in June), illuminates some of the ways in which animism and gender roles
within that traditional culture might be mutually-informing. Animals also
people Arthur Allen’s elegiac monologue, ‘Vanishing Upon Vanishing’, in
which the speaker channels their grief at the loss of a relative during
the pandemic through descriptions of the burial of a friend’s black cat:
‘It seems we lose someone | of extraordinary dear- ness | every four years
| and only one time | in three is it the cat,’ prompting us to consider
how the pandemic has affected our relationship with our pets - and indeed
the notion of pet-keeping in general - as we share closer quarters with
them over longer periods.

Maybe part of what this attention to creatures that don’t overtly
respond to the odes we write them offers is the timely opportunity to reflect
on and confront not just the ecological work’s constructed nature but the
actual process of composition. Lots of issue two’s poems do this. Josh Smyth’s
‘The Moose Hunt’, for example, reads like the field notes of a poet-turned-
naturalist in search of the Nature Poem in its urbanatural habitat, somewhere
between the scrolling action of a thumb and a childhood memory. Meanwhile,
Jack Bigglestone’s ‘A Satyr in Translation’ prises open some of the ways
in which human sexuality and caprine physicality might be spliced and handed
down through myth by enacting multiple simultaneous translations: animal into
human, movement into speech, sight into sound. Sylee Gore’s Q & A poem,
‘Q. Let’s talk a bit more about that decision to shift away from organic
materials,’ goes a step further. A portrait of the eco-artist in their
own words, it’s a dig at the notion of celebrity within ecological art as
well as the tragic need to make every blow of the chisel a reference
to the Anthropocene. The poem’s willingness to go there and to laugh at
its own inability to process or make good seems a constituent cadence
of a wider environmental sensitivity.

For this issue, we invited contributors to comment on a piece of our
choosing, which we then collated into a notes section, hoping to string up
some guy-ropes of light crit around a selection of the work we’re lucky
enough to include. We passed the work around with no particular briefing
and were warmed by the generous and wholehearted responses we got back.
Our thanks to the poets who took this experiment on so openhandedly.
Our gratitude also to all our contributors for their ranging, living words
that go a long way to reanimating and re-embodying this digital scene we’ve
all had a hand in keeping real since last March.

Patrick Romero McCafferty, June 2021