Poetry review – RUST CANYON: Alex Josephy considers Lauren Mason’s highly effective eco-poetry which uses a particular story to alert readers to the wider dangers facing our planet
Rust Canyon
Lauren Mason
V Press
ISBN: 978-1-7394122-9-6
33 pages £7.50
According to the poet, Lauren Mason: ‘The poems in this book move through real and metaphorical landscapes of canyon, river, and desert to consider family, violence, control and distance.’ The ‘real’ landscape of Rust Canyon is Glen Canyon, Arizona, an area once home to sacred Native American sites and relatively recently subjected to damming and flooding to create a reservoir. Mason’s poems never stray far from the canyon, its typography, flora and fauna, and its side canyons which are re-emerging as climate change lowers the water levels. But within the constraints of the canyon walls and across the surrounding desert, they fly in every direction a human heart might take.
On first reading, the poems struck me as a chain of finely-constructed riddles, where nothing can be taken at face value and pain may be hard to distinguish from pleasure. There is a desert, a canyon, a river, rust-red earth, ferns and other plants, seeds, bleached bones. These are joined by more human elements: a lover, an enigmatic father, paintings, photographs, a fragile but resilient body. In the first poem, the canyon is introduced as a ‘haloed slit’, formed by a ‘long-dead river, her knife and soother.’ This sets a tone of surprising, ambivalent language and imagery through which Mason explores her themes, the canyon mise-en-scene refracting into multiple meanings.
There is reference to Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of datura, a hallucinogenic plant native to the area; its influence seems to be at play in poems where the narrator shape-shifts between canyon plants, creatures and features of the land itself. In recurring sections of “Retell”, scattered among the other poems, she becomes the canyon, a giant sequoia, an owl, a fallow doe. Her visions border on nightmare, but also give her ‘heartwood, its thousand rings’, and power:
It was enough to know that I had claws.
The visionary eye afforded by datura (or by desertification and extreme heat) makes for extraordinarily intense observation, for instance in landscape seen “Through the Pelvis” where ‘the mesa sheened, woozy/from noon’s delirium.’ Painterly, to me these descriptions are at times reminiscent of Surreal paintings. I’m thinking for instance of Salvador Dali’s ‘paranoid’ hyper-realism, as in “What the Mesa Whispers at Dawn”:
Distance can be stacked on canvas
yet ravines keep their secrets
like creases on a lover’s palm.
White space and layout are often used to powerful effect, as in “The Canyon Holds the Climber to Account”, two word columns through the empty centre of which the canyon carves its shape. In another poem there is an unforgettable image of the canyon as mother, parched by the damming of the river, the foetus clinging on inside despite everything:
a small, bright fern
on the wall she’d built from disobedience.
An uneasy sense of brewing violence darkens the poems about family, and in particular about the narrator’s father. Mason has described her work as not confessional, so I take it that these are to be read as more widely relevant to institutionalised violence, societal unease and the pain caused by violation of land and cultural heritage. Still, there are images that convey hurt in an intimately personal way, as in this description of lightning in a poem early in the book:
…quick and expected as a fist
splitting the already swollen sky
The father, too, is an ambivalent figure, mainly absent and sending obscure gifts that read as messages: ‘a paper kiss’; ‘a DSM-5’:
you sent my birth certificate
and something smouldering
which fell in the valley as charcoal
There’s a suggestion that he may have died in a fire, but the story is hinted at with deft restraint. The poet’s own pulse counsels her:
leave this door closed, child.
Natural phenomena such as the sun, ‘unbearably bright’, are portrayed throughout most of the poems as literally infuriated by our destructive interventions. Yet there is hope in the way the poems testify to nature’s resilience, identifying closely with the abused land.
Never say barren
when each handful of rust-red sand
holds a dozen seeds
waiting for rain.
When flesh has burned away
a sun-bleached skull
might bloom again.
Not having encountered Lauren Mason’s poems before, I was delighted to discover this collection, and have enjoyed it more with each re-reading. Incantation, anaphora, ‘aphoristic mutterings’, combined with sure-footed word music and lineation, make Rust Canyon an exhilarating read. This is eco-poetry at its most effective: poems to waken and alert the reader, at each turn linking personal survival to environmental politics. With what amounts in the end to love, Mason focuses on a particular story set in a damaged river valley, and in doing so lays bare the risks we face across the planet.
Aug 10 2026
London Grip Poetry Review -Lauren Mason
Poetry review – RUST CANYON: Alex Josephy considers Lauren Mason’s highly effective eco-poetry which uses a particular story to alert readers to the wider dangers facing our planet
Rust Canyon
Lauren Mason
V Press
ISBN: 978-1-7394122-9-6
33 pages £7.50
According to the poet, Lauren Mason: ‘The poems in this book move through real and metaphorical landscapes of canyon, river, and desert to consider family, violence, control and distance.’ The ‘real’ landscape of Rust Canyon is Glen Canyon, Arizona, an area once home to sacred Native American sites and relatively recently subjected to damming and flooding to create a reservoir. Mason’s poems never stray far from the canyon, its typography, flora and fauna, and its side canyons which are re-emerging as climate change lowers the water levels. But within the constraints of the canyon walls and across the surrounding desert, they fly in every direction a human heart might take.
On first reading, the poems struck me as a chain of finely-constructed riddles, where nothing can be taken at face value and pain may be hard to distinguish from pleasure. There is a desert, a canyon, a river, rust-red earth, ferns and other plants, seeds, bleached bones. These are joined by more human elements: a lover, an enigmatic father, paintings, photographs, a fragile but resilient body. In the first poem, the canyon is introduced as a ‘haloed slit’, formed by a ‘long-dead river, her knife and soother.’ This sets a tone of surprising, ambivalent language and imagery through which Mason explores her themes, the canyon mise-en-scene refracting into multiple meanings.
There is reference to Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings of datura, a hallucinogenic plant native to the area; its influence seems to be at play in poems where the narrator shape-shifts between canyon plants, creatures and features of the land itself. In recurring sections of “Retell”, scattered among the other poems, she becomes the canyon, a giant sequoia, an owl, a fallow doe. Her visions border on nightmare, but also give her ‘heartwood, its thousand rings’, and power:
It was enough to know that I had claws.
The visionary eye afforded by datura (or by desertification and extreme heat) makes for extraordinarily intense observation, for instance in landscape seen “Through the Pelvis” where ‘the mesa sheened, woozy/from noon’s delirium.’ Painterly, to me these descriptions are at times reminiscent of Surreal paintings. I’m thinking for instance of Salvador Dali’s ‘paranoid’ hyper-realism, as in “What the Mesa Whispers at Dawn”:
Distance can be stacked on canvas
yet ravines keep their secrets
like creases on a lover’s palm.
White space and layout are often used to powerful effect, as in “The Canyon Holds the Climber to Account”, two word columns through the empty centre of which the canyon carves its shape. In another poem there is an unforgettable image of the canyon as mother, parched by the damming of the river, the foetus clinging on inside despite everything:
a small, bright fern
on the wall she’d built from disobedience.
An uneasy sense of brewing violence darkens the poems about family, and in particular about the narrator’s father. Mason has described her work as not confessional, so I take it that these are to be read as more widely relevant to institutionalised violence, societal unease and the pain caused by violation of land and cultural heritage. Still, there are images that convey hurt in an intimately personal way, as in this description of lightning in a poem early in the book:
…quick and expected as a fist
splitting the already swollen sky
The father, too, is an ambivalent figure, mainly absent and sending obscure gifts that read as messages: ‘a paper kiss’; ‘a DSM-5’:
you sent my birth certificate
and something smouldering
which fell in the valley as charcoal
There’s a suggestion that he may have died in a fire, but the story is hinted at with deft restraint. The poet’s own pulse counsels her:
leave this door closed, child.
Natural phenomena such as the sun, ‘unbearably bright’, are portrayed throughout most of the poems as literally infuriated by our destructive interventions. Yet there is hope in the way the poems testify to nature’s resilience, identifying closely with the abused land.
Never say barren
when each handful of rust-red sand
holds a dozen seeds
waiting for rain.
When flesh has burned away
a sun-bleached skull
might bloom again.
Not having encountered Lauren Mason’s poems before, I was delighted to discover this collection, and have enjoyed it more with each re-reading. Incantation, anaphora, ‘aphoristic mutterings’, combined with sure-footed word music and lineation, make Rust Canyon an exhilarating read. This is eco-poetry at its most effective: poems to waken and alert the reader, at each turn linking personal survival to environmental politics. With what amounts in the end to love, Mason focuses on a particular story set in a damaged river valley, and in doing so lays bare the risks we face across the planet.