Poetry review – EPHEMERAL: James Roderick Burns commends Jane McLaughlin’s chapbook for both its poetry and its purpose
Ephemeral
Jane McLaughlin
Dreich
ISBN 9 781739 596934
£6.00
Ephemeral, as its title suggests, is an urgent book – a polemic, really, charged with a great and pressing need to communicate with the reader going beyond the normal needs of a poet to share their thoughts and insights. We are in a climate crisis. No serious scientist disputes this, and with every further international report – and flash flood, wildfire and grotesquely early spring – the consensus builds. Jane McLaughlin wants the reader to understand that the time is now: to do something about this, in our own lives, and the wider life of the world, before it is too late and catastrophic change accelerates into unstoppable heat-death and then extinction.
Is this too stark a summary of a thirty page chapbook? No; certainly the poet would not say so. Is it, therefore, a short and punchy political tome designed only to bring any lagging climate dinosaurs on board?
Emphatically not.
This is a book of finely-crafted, delicate and subtle poems with a huge overarching purpose, and McLaughlin demonstrates that poetry with a message can also be great poetry – can be more effective in its task, indeed, because it is great poetry.
Take the title poem. In lines reminiscent of Hopkins’ ‘Inversnaid’ (“long live the weeds and the wilderness yet”), McLaughlin exhorts the reader to seize hold “of fin and face and leaf and wing and carapace”, to “write it into poems/carve it on rocks”, “smell its scents eat its fruit lie in its grass”, as all of nature is fragile, imperilled and fleeting. The poem could not be more urgent, yet holds out pleading hands with grace and lyricism. Act now, it says
before plankton dies
before mycelium threads dry up
before bees stop flying
before woodlice disappear
before bears shrivel without ice
In other poems, swooping ‘Geese’ – elegantly riding navigational winds – “know what’s coming”; “Outside the sky boils/the land burns red brick” (‘The Nocturnal House’); and ‘Buzzards’ “rise further, diminish/to tiny scrapes on the arching blue”.
Neither is this some passing, contemporary phenomenon – the poet locates the climate crisis in industrial modernity, specifically the last two hundred years’ exploitation of the natural world, here figured in ‘The Captain’s House, New Bedford’ as the luxuries of a middle-class life dredged from the guts of natural creatures:
His wife’s closet ripples with blue and green silk,
Paris corsets and wide skirts
stiffened with baleen. Her piano
sings with the teeth of whales.
Clocks, watches keep sperm-oiled time.
We have been killing and stripping out nature for centuries. Ephemeral demands we stop and look at what we have done, and continue to do – then with elegant, lyrical lines, with a wide variety of verse forms (free verse, prose poems, sonnets, tanka) and an earnestness that never veers into sentimentality, an anger that never obscures the poetry of its expression, asks us to do everything we can to arrest this decline.
For nature is full of wonders, and this pamphlet sings their glory with clarity, love and sorrow. ‘Araneus Diadematus’ perhaps puts it best. The tiniest marvels teeter on the brink; let us work to pull them back:
Somewhere deep in the shrubs
is a silk purse full of embryos.
Soon it will be a jewelled pod
of vivid yellow spiderlings.
A little supernova, scattering her offspring.
bead-bright, sparks of star-stuff,
each programmed for its spiral universe.
Nov 5 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Jane McLaughlin
Poetry review – EPHEMERAL: James Roderick Burns commends Jane McLaughlin’s chapbook for both its poetry and its purpose
Ephemeral, as its title suggests, is an urgent book – a polemic, really, charged with a great and pressing need to communicate with the reader going beyond the normal needs of a poet to share their thoughts and insights. We are in a climate crisis. No serious scientist disputes this, and with every further international report – and flash flood, wildfire and grotesquely early spring – the consensus builds. Jane McLaughlin wants the reader to understand that the time is now: to do something about this, in our own lives, and the wider life of the world, before it is too late and catastrophic change accelerates into unstoppable heat-death and then extinction.
Is this too stark a summary of a thirty page chapbook? No; certainly the poet would not say so. Is it, therefore, a short and punchy political tome designed only to bring any lagging climate dinosaurs on board?
Emphatically not.
This is a book of finely-crafted, delicate and subtle poems with a huge overarching purpose, and McLaughlin demonstrates that poetry with a message can also be great poetry – can be more effective in its task, indeed, because it is great poetry.
Take the title poem. In lines reminiscent of Hopkins’ ‘Inversnaid’ (“long live the weeds and the wilderness yet”), McLaughlin exhorts the reader to seize hold “of fin and face and leaf and wing and carapace”, to “write it into poems/carve it on rocks”, “smell its scents eat its fruit lie in its grass”, as all of nature is fragile, imperilled and fleeting. The poem could not be more urgent, yet holds out pleading hands with grace and lyricism. Act now, it says
In other poems, swooping ‘Geese’ – elegantly riding navigational winds – “know what’s coming”; “Outside the sky boils/the land burns red brick” (‘The Nocturnal House’); and ‘Buzzards’ “rise further, diminish/to tiny scrapes on the arching blue”.
Neither is this some passing, contemporary phenomenon – the poet locates the climate crisis in industrial modernity, specifically the last two hundred years’ exploitation of the natural world, here figured in ‘The Captain’s House, New Bedford’ as the luxuries of a middle-class life dredged from the guts of natural creatures:
We have been killing and stripping out nature for centuries. Ephemeral demands we stop and look at what we have done, and continue to do – then with elegant, lyrical lines, with a wide variety of verse forms (free verse, prose poems, sonnets, tanka) and an earnestness that never veers into sentimentality, an anger that never obscures the poetry of its expression, asks us to do everything we can to arrest this decline.
For nature is full of wonders, and this pamphlet sings their glory with clarity, love and sorrow. ‘Araneus Diadematus’ perhaps puts it best. The tiniest marvels teeter on the brink; let us work to pull them back: