Poetry review – POND: Michael Brown considers Sarah Westcott’s inventive use of language for engaging with the natural world
Pond
Sarah Westcott
Braag Press
ISBN 978-1-7395051-1-0
£6.50
Sarah Westcott’s pamphlet Pond attempts to establish an intimacy with the “presence” of a “suburban pond”. Throughout this strange and intriguing collection there is an awareness of the relationship between human language and the “thingness” of the pond itself. The voice is sometimes necessarily made “other” and even alienating as in ‘Earthed’:“This other living, living here”.
At times this strangeness and sense of an unfamiliar form extends to the way the poems appear on the page with the white of the page extemporising gaps and sudden spaces or closing them abruptly to confound our readerly expectations:
And then
this pond became a page
daphnia all over my hands.
I wiped them on my legs, thought, briefly —
a pond may be a space for the mind to squat: cashless, spanning
(‘Pond I’)
There is an intrinsic confidence in the voice shown through the repeated structures (“I peeled the pond open…. I knelt to language….I felt form around me”) which takes some guts to write. It is as though the poet has deliberately eschewed traditional poetic tropes or describing the pond in human terms but, rather, wants to test the limits of knowledge and the ability of language to enter into an alien world.
A keen biologist’s eye picks up the fine minutiae of detail without the expansion of thought that another lyrical muse on a body of water might confer. A fly is described as “the “most final of forms: a small machine…”; a snail is a “bright data form”, water is “stretchy”. Sometimes the snapshot of language imagery is particularly startling and unexpected as in her description of tadpoles: “…so many loose commas / thickening into form…” (‘Common Frog’)
The most overtly beautiful writing near the end of the pamphlet in ‘The River’ also has a preoccupation with language:
The River
makes itself over and over
in its own making
and in the making makes of itself a voice,
a throat of stones…
This willingness, on the part of the poet, to sit close to the “speech” of water, its “partial” being reminds us of Don Paterson’s aphorism that there is nothing out there, no thing that has in “its possession” the language we have accorded it. Sarah Westcott’s brave pamphlet is an attempt to unmake the automatic connections we have established between language and nature.
Jun 19 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Sarah Westcott
Poetry review – POND: Michael Brown considers Sarah Westcott’s inventive use of language for engaging with the natural world
Sarah Westcott’s pamphlet Pond attempts to establish an intimacy with the “presence” of a “suburban pond”. Throughout this strange and intriguing collection there is an awareness of the relationship between human language and the “thingness” of the pond itself. The voice is sometimes necessarily made “other” and even alienating as in ‘Earthed’:“This other living, living here”.
At times this strangeness and sense of an unfamiliar form extends to the way the poems appear on the page with the white of the page extemporising gaps and sudden spaces or closing them abruptly to confound our readerly expectations:
And then this pond became a page daphnia all over my hands. I wiped them on my legs, thought, briefly — a pond may be a space for the mind to squat: cashless, spanning (‘Pond I’)There is an intrinsic confidence in the voice shown through the repeated structures (“I peeled the pond open…. I knelt to language….I felt form around me”) which takes some guts to write. It is as though the poet has deliberately eschewed traditional poetic tropes or describing the pond in human terms but, rather, wants to test the limits of knowledge and the ability of language to enter into an alien world.
A keen biologist’s eye picks up the fine minutiae of detail without the expansion of thought that another lyrical muse on a body of water might confer. A fly is described as “the “most final of forms: a small machine…”; a snail is a “bright data form”, water is “stretchy”. Sometimes the snapshot of language imagery is particularly startling and unexpected as in her description of tadpoles: “…so many loose commas / thickening into form…” (‘Common Frog’)
The most overtly beautiful writing near the end of the pamphlet in ‘The River’ also has a preoccupation with language:
The River makes itself over and over in its own making and in the making makes of itself a voice, a throat of stones…This willingness, on the part of the poet, to sit close to the “speech” of water, its “partial” being reminds us of Don Paterson’s aphorism that there is nothing out there, no thing that has in “its possession” the language we have accorded it. Sarah Westcott’s brave pamphlet is an attempt to unmake the automatic connections we have established between language and nature.