Stuart Henson detects a note of anger in Jane Routhâs particular and personal responses to place and nature
Listening to the Night
Jane Routh
Smith Doorstop, 2018,
ISBN 978-1-912196-17-3
64pp ÂŁ9.95
âPoets love nature and themselves are loveââor so wrote John Clare from the asylum sometime around 1850. In the intervening hundred and seventy years British poetryâs love-affair with nature hasnât always run smooth. The twentieth century was generally a good time. You only have to open your Gurney, Thomas, Andrew Young and the smell of loam drifts out, and later, when things were looking a bit grim, along came Hughes to affirm the age-long partnership of poetry and the natural world. Right now weâre in a stickier patch. Weâre guilty about what weâve done. Deforestation, urbanisation, climate change⌠Itâs getting harder to look Nature in the face.
Interestingly these days itâs women who are in the vanguard of nature-writing, on the poetry front at least. For starters, youâd think of Alice Oswald, Kathleen Jamie and perhaps Jane Routh. Jamieâs Findings (2005) and Routhâs Falling into Place (2014) are both fine meditations on the place of womanâand by extension manâamong the lochs and fells, the corncrakes and curlews, though these of course are prose works. With poetry itâs not so easy to be matter-of-fact, to be scientific. And that, with Romanticism and Rural England long gone, is the default standpoint of the naturalist. If we can understand the world and what weâre doing in it in scientific terms then perhaps there are actions we can take, alternatives we can embrace.
What, then, can poetry do further? Particularise? Argue? Lament? Enjoy? To some extent Jane Routhâs new collection does all these things. What we have learnt from Clare is to observe and listen. As youâd expect from the title, Jane Routh is a good listenerâto the wik wik of a Tawny Owl, the âhum/not humâ of the fridge at 3am, or the âchatter of growls and barks and protestsâ from an angry bat that has found its way into her kitchen. From the book as a whole you get a sense of a life lived with rather than against nature, of acceptance and challenge.
âThings are never what / you expect.â she declares of the departing swallows that donât seem to be tracking south.
How can she know whether
sheâs watching them leave? How
can you know when you wind down
a car window to wave goodbye
and shout See you soon,
you wonât?
Jane Routhâs language is easy-going with little in the way of rhyme or metrics, but the use of line breaks here at the end of âShe thinks she sees the swallows leave Cairn Holyâ conveys exactly that undermining uncertainty and the desperation of loss that weâre driven to feel in the face of dwindling populations and negative statistics.
Routhâs holding (she likes that word, and so do I) in the Forest of Bowland supplies enough of birds, stones and bones for a whole series of books, but from Listening to the Night you also get a feeling for the interdependence of all life, animal and human. A number of the poems deal with community, memory, fragilityâŚ
Already enough light to outline the landscape
like an old albumen print in soft greys,
the meadow awash with its seedheads, and pale.
White flowers in the garden like small lamps.
Everythingâs still; even the sleeping childâs still.
This is the hour insomniacs dread â
when bodies wonât heal, when memories
will fail and the whole green world you live in
falter and shrivel awayâŚ
(âThe worry hourâ)
âOne placeâ gives a local habitation and a name to the fields, woods and neighbours that you can only know when youâve lived rootedly âall your adult lifeâ. After felling trees you planted too close âYou drop logs in the stove, without regret, though / theyâre recognisable still.â Listening to the downspouts âfull of short vowelsâ. People become stories, names on maps, on gravestones. Thereâs something reminiscent in this spry, tender poem of Routhâs not-so- distant neighbour Norman Nicholson, whose autobiography Wednesday Early Closing is well worth ferreting-out (from the Faber Finds print-on-demand series) if you like his work.
Thereâs a balance in this collection, but the green world comes back with each new morning, along with that question of how to speak of it, since like humans the natural world is mortal, though other. For poets a degree of anthropomorphism is allowed, but weâre not fooled by the husband-and-wife metaphor that threads down âMy neighbour killed on the roadâ. Nor, I think, does Routh intend us to be. When you live in an isolated place, the familiar raptors, the regular visiting mammals, become companionable, their absence a genuine sorrow:
Strange how much I miss him, how
the air in the valley, long nights and
arriving home all feel shapeless now
My own preference is for the spitting angry language that conveys Routhâs frustration at our casual attitude to bio-securityâwhich flares up in two poems towards the end of the book. Hymenoscyphus fraxineus is the fungus responsible for ash die-back and its spread has been blamed on wind-blown distribution from the continent. The poet, as scientist and map-reader, is aware of its initial distribution close to the south-east ports and its subsequent spread inland, on trucks and in commercial compost.
catastrophe you say
human
and culpable
you
with your commerce
cankers carted
incognito
In âWind and woodsâ she points the finger directly at the passing wagon that âturns across the windâ so the millions of spores are up and off again âto re-settle their invisible deadliness / on the clean new leaves of a sapling ash â / a self-seeded adventurer / which had been heading for the skyâ. Too often science has told us whatâs happening but left it to the poet and the activist to suggest a response.
There are poems and prose-poems about history and family, lost and recycled things, the living and the dead, but this book is still about tracing a particular and personal response to place â or places. John Clare would recognise Routhâs mole-eyed primroses and her attachments to locality. Our present is tied up with our past, what we become is infused with what we have been. Itâs that continuity that Routh is coming to terms with in âAgainst memoirâ, where she refers us to âthose selves / whoâll slow us down, settling into our bodies / with their foibles and failing bonesâ. By inference we should listen to the animals and plants that are both like us and unlike us, just as we might listen to our passing selves.
Learn to love us, too, they say, us and this world
youâre making in which weâll have to survive.
London Grip Poetry Review – Jane Routh
December 7, 2018 by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, ecology, poetry reviews, year 2018 • Tags: books, ecology, poetry, Stuart Henson • 0 Comments
Stuart Henson detects a note of anger in Jane Routhâs particular and personal responses to place and nature
âPoets love nature and themselves are loveââor so wrote John Clare from the asylum sometime around 1850. In the intervening hundred and seventy years British poetryâs love-affair with nature hasnât always run smooth. The twentieth century was generally a good time. You only have to open your Gurney, Thomas, Andrew Young and the smell of loam drifts out, and later, when things were looking a bit grim, along came Hughes to affirm the age-long partnership of poetry and the natural world. Right now weâre in a stickier patch. Weâre guilty about what weâve done. Deforestation, urbanisation, climate change⌠Itâs getting harder to look Nature in the face.
Interestingly these days itâs women who are in the vanguard of nature-writing, on the poetry front at least. For starters, youâd think of Alice Oswald, Kathleen Jamie and perhaps Jane Routh. Jamieâs Findings (2005) and Routhâs Falling into Place (2014) are both fine meditations on the place of womanâand by extension manâamong the lochs and fells, the corncrakes and curlews, though these of course are prose works. With poetry itâs not so easy to be matter-of-fact, to be scientific. And that, with Romanticism and Rural England long gone, is the default standpoint of the naturalist. If we can understand the world and what weâre doing in it in scientific terms then perhaps there are actions we can take, alternatives we can embrace.
What, then, can poetry do further? Particularise? Argue? Lament? Enjoy? To some extent Jane Routhâs new collection does all these things. What we have learnt from Clare is to observe and listen. As youâd expect from the title, Jane Routh is a good listenerâto the wik wik of a Tawny Owl, the âhum/not humâ of the fridge at 3am, or the âchatter of growls and barks and protestsâ from an angry bat that has found its way into her kitchen. From the book as a whole you get a sense of a life lived with rather than against nature, of acceptance and challenge.
âThings are never what / you expect.â she declares of the departing swallows that donât seem to be tracking south.
Jane Routhâs language is easy-going with little in the way of rhyme or metrics, but the use of line breaks here at the end of âShe thinks she sees the swallows leave Cairn Holyâ conveys exactly that undermining uncertainty and the desperation of loss that weâre driven to feel in the face of dwindling populations and negative statistics.
Routhâs holding (she likes that word, and so do I) in the Forest of Bowland supplies enough of birds, stones and bones for a whole series of books, but from Listening to the Night you also get a feeling for the interdependence of all life, animal and human. A number of the poems deal with community, memory, fragilityâŚ
Already enough light to outline the landscape like an old albumen print in soft greys, the meadow awash with its seedheads, and pale. White flowers in the garden like small lamps. Everythingâs still; even the sleeping childâs still. This is the hour insomniacs dread â when bodies wonât heal, when memories will fail and the whole green world you live in falter and shrivel away⌠(âThe worry hourâ)âOne placeâ gives a local habitation and a name to the fields, woods and neighbours that you can only know when youâve lived rootedly âall your adult lifeâ. After felling trees you planted too close âYou drop logs in the stove, without regret, though / theyâre recognisable still.â Listening to the downspouts âfull of short vowelsâ. People become stories, names on maps, on gravestones. Thereâs something reminiscent in this spry, tender poem of Routhâs not-so- distant neighbour Norman Nicholson, whose autobiography Wednesday Early Closing is well worth ferreting-out (from the Faber Finds print-on-demand series) if you like his work.
Thereâs a balance in this collection, but the green world comes back with each new morning, along with that question of how to speak of it, since like humans the natural world is mortal, though other. For poets a degree of anthropomorphism is allowed, but weâre not fooled by the husband-and-wife metaphor that threads down âMy neighbour killed on the roadâ. Nor, I think, does Routh intend us to be. When you live in an isolated place, the familiar raptors, the regular visiting mammals, become companionable, their absence a genuine sorrow:
My own preference is for the spitting angry language that conveys Routhâs frustration at our casual attitude to bio-securityâwhich flares up in two poems towards the end of the book. Hymenoscyphus fraxineus is the fungus responsible for ash die-back and its spread has been blamed on wind-blown distribution from the continent. The poet, as scientist and map-reader, is aware of its initial distribution close to the south-east ports and its subsequent spread inland, on trucks and in commercial compost.
catastrophe you say human and culpable you with your commerce cankers carted incognitoIn âWind and woodsâ she points the finger directly at the passing wagon that âturns across the windâ so the millions of spores are up and off again âto re-settle their invisible deadliness / on the clean new leaves of a sapling ash â / a self-seeded adventurer / which had been heading for the skyâ. Too often science has told us whatâs happening but left it to the poet and the activist to suggest a response.
There are poems and prose-poems about history and family, lost and recycled things, the living and the dead, but this book is still about tracing a particular and personal response to place â or places. John Clare would recognise Routhâs mole-eyed primroses and her attachments to locality. Our present is tied up with our past, what we become is infused with what we have been. Itâs that continuity that Routh is coming to terms with in âAgainst memoirâ, where she refers us to âthose selves / whoâll slow us down, settling into our bodies / with their foibles and failing bonesâ. By inference we should listen to the animals and plants that are both like us and unlike us, just as we might listen to our passing selves.