Poetry review – AS GRASS BECOMES FLESH: Colin Carberry explores the complex poetic world conjured by Michael Lee Rattigan’s imagination
as grass becomes flesh
Michael Lee Rattigan
Black Herald Press, 2024: Chartres-London
ISBN: 978-2-919582-35-8
59 pages
For such a slim, understated volume, with a take-it-or-leave-it minimalist cover, British poet Michael Lee Rattigan’s third book packs a significant wallop. While others attempt to garner headlines and make a fuss about themselves on social media, Rattigan produces parsed, elegant, multi-layered poems—39 in this case—that challenge our understanding of what poetry is, and take us on a surreal outing to the limits of language.
The book opens with ‘omnidirectional’—which can be read in multiple ways and, as the title implies, in a multitude of directions. In this history-less “prepetual present”, a “here without where”—a nowhere “in which a cricket detects / the almost thermal noise / made by a spider…”—the poet is just another life-form going quietly about his business in a teeming, riotously multitudinous universe whose origins go back “700 million years”. He is fascinated by the idea of being able to see into realities denied to him except through his imagination, as he attempts to decipher “another alphabet’s vibration”:
The cleft spaces between the footfalls of an ant
freezing an elephant midstride twanging the web
of another alphabet’s vibration an owl leaning forward
with ageless ears mapping the dark.
A whale’s song in the moth’s ear uproots a pyramid
as the hatchling steers a magnetic course
This extends to communication, too. Rattigan is keenly conscious that with this mass of non-human life-forms comes an unknowable quantity of modes of communication. He posits himself at the heart of this vast web of interdependent minerals, plants, insects, birds and animals, all existing on a non-linear, non-hierarchical basis. This poet’s compassion and sympathies extend to every thing he can imagine and—is this is posible?—even what one cannot. All living things—and everything in this poet’s universe lives, or is living—has inherent rights and is deserving of respect and understanding. Like the boy in Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Oracle’, seated in the hollow trunk of a willow tree, the poet imbibes power and sustenance from the universe, while subsuming his identity ever more deeply into the earth’s matrix, and thus becomes privy to, well, everything.
Sometimes, as in the poetry of Ted Hughes, this urge “to imagine ourselves into the alternate natures of the beings that exist alongside us” (Paco Calvo)—the epigraph to ‘Anew’—results in a vista of horror: nature’s red-in-tooth-and-claw reality laid bare. Rattigan chooses to focus his gaze on the brighter side of life—for him the opportunity to sing in the forms of those same beings is a joyful, multi-layered miracle. The language of ‘Entangled’, for example, is one of heightened, if restrained delight, and while his work, in broad terms, is grounded in Ecopoetry, Deep Imagism, and Surrealism, snatches of Anglo-Saxon verse and sprung rhythm often register as well: “on stalks of sound / lichens / leafy scaly dusty branched / drinking from the rock / forms / real and intangible / biospheres with spurs / the spore of a single word / algal bloom / a rigmarole of roots scavenging the soil / as grass becomes flesh…” Like Whitman, he catalogues and sings creatures great and tiny, while also luring our minds outward, to marvel at earth’s vast spaces, seascapes, forests, the oceans and the sky, and the distant mysteries of our ever-expanding universe.
His voice is truly singular, and while he has absorbed British, continental European and North American poets, his vision extends well beyond his native England. A skilled and careful translator as well as a writer of original verse, he has lived for extended spells in Spain and Mexico and has rendered the complete collection of Fernando Pessoa’s Alberto Caeiro Poems (Rufus Books, 2007) as well as César Vallejo’s Trilce—one of the most complex books in the Spanish (or any?) language.
Indeed, the poem ‘Multitudes’, one of the book’s most complex and accomplished pieces, owes a debt to Latin American poetry without losing any of its authenticity or its own distinct signature. Opening with “a mother’s milk” and “what is invisible/inaudible” and moving to “a worm’s trophosome” as far as “herbivorous and carnivorous mammals” we end up where we started—“in the interval between life and death”. Rattigan knows that nothing truly dies; it transforms. There is no end to our wandering, our moaning, but we would be much happier if we could learn to put aside our sense of our self-importance and accept our transience. Life is fleeting; enjoy the moment as it fades.
No achievement, literary or otherwise, however, occurs in a vacuum. Rattigan has surrounded himself with a team of experienced editors and poet-translators from Paris to Toronto. Paul Stubbs and Blandire Longre of The Black Herald Press, along with Agnes Cserháti, owner and chief editor of Rufus Books, have backed him from his earliest poetic efforts and this support is ongoing. When a poet writes verse this complex and on the edge, good editors become vital arbiters. as grass becomes flesh is a unique and compelling collection, one that continues to resonate in the mind long after reading.
Colin Carberry is a poet and translator. Among his full-length translations are Love Poems by Jaime Sabines (Biblioasis). Carberry’s work can be found in digital and print journals and newspapers such as Poetry Ireland Review, El Universal (Mexico), The High Window Journal, The Irish Times and Exile: The Literary Quarterly. A collection of his poems in Spanish translation is forthcoming.
Aug 16 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Michael Lee Rattigan
Poetry review – AS GRASS BECOMES FLESH: Colin Carberry explores the complex poetic world conjured by Michael Lee Rattigan’s imagination
as grass becomes flesh
Michael Lee Rattigan
Black Herald Press, 2024: Chartres-London
ISBN: 978-2-919582-35-8
59 pages
For such a slim, understated volume, with a take-it-or-leave-it minimalist cover, British poet Michael Lee Rattigan’s third book packs a significant wallop. While others attempt to garner headlines and make a fuss about themselves on social media, Rattigan produces parsed, elegant, multi-layered poems—39 in this case—that challenge our understanding of what poetry is, and take us on a surreal outing to the limits of language.
The book opens with ‘omnidirectional’—which can be read in multiple ways and, as the title implies, in a multitude of directions. In this history-less “prepetual present”, a “here without where”—a nowhere “in which a cricket detects / the almost thermal noise / made by a spider…”—the poet is just another life-form going quietly about his business in a teeming, riotously multitudinous universe whose origins go back “700 million years”. He is fascinated by the idea of being able to see into realities denied to him except through his imagination, as he attempts to decipher “another alphabet’s vibration”:
The cleft spaces between the footfalls of an ant
freezing an elephant midstride twanging the web
of another alphabet’s vibration an owl leaning forward
with ageless ears mapping the dark.
A whale’s song in the moth’s ear uproots a pyramid
as the hatchling steers a magnetic course
This extends to communication, too. Rattigan is keenly conscious that with this mass of non-human life-forms comes an unknowable quantity of modes of communication. He posits himself at the heart of this vast web of interdependent minerals, plants, insects, birds and animals, all existing on a non-linear, non-hierarchical basis. This poet’s compassion and sympathies extend to every thing he can imagine and—is this is posible?—even what one cannot. All living things—and everything in this poet’s universe lives, or is living—has inherent rights and is deserving of respect and understanding. Like the boy in Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Oracle’, seated in the hollow trunk of a willow tree, the poet imbibes power and sustenance from the universe, while subsuming his identity ever more deeply into the earth’s matrix, and thus becomes privy to, well, everything.
Sometimes, as in the poetry of Ted Hughes, this urge “to imagine ourselves into the alternate natures of the beings that exist alongside us” (Paco Calvo)—the epigraph to ‘Anew’—results in a vista of horror: nature’s red-in-tooth-and-claw reality laid bare. Rattigan chooses to focus his gaze on the brighter side of life—for him the opportunity to sing in the forms of those same beings is a joyful, multi-layered miracle. The language of ‘Entangled’, for example, is one of heightened, if restrained delight, and while his work, in broad terms, is grounded in Ecopoetry, Deep Imagism, and Surrealism, snatches of Anglo-Saxon verse and sprung rhythm often register as well: “on stalks of sound / lichens / leafy scaly dusty branched / drinking from the rock / forms / real and intangible / biospheres with spurs / the spore of a single word / algal bloom / a rigmarole of roots scavenging the soil / as grass becomes flesh…” Like Whitman, he catalogues and sings creatures great and tiny, while also luring our minds outward, to marvel at earth’s vast spaces, seascapes, forests, the oceans and the sky, and the distant mysteries of our ever-expanding universe.
His voice is truly singular, and while he has absorbed British, continental European and North American poets, his vision extends well beyond his native England. A skilled and careful translator as well as a writer of original verse, he has lived for extended spells in Spain and Mexico and has rendered the complete collection of Fernando Pessoa’s Alberto Caeiro Poems (Rufus Books, 2007) as well as César Vallejo’s Trilce—one of the most complex books in the Spanish (or any?) language.
Indeed, the poem ‘Multitudes’, one of the book’s most complex and accomplished pieces, owes a debt to Latin American poetry without losing any of its authenticity or its own distinct signature. Opening with “a mother’s milk” and “what is invisible/inaudible” and moving to “a worm’s trophosome” as far as “herbivorous and carnivorous mammals” we end up where we started—“in the interval between life and death”. Rattigan knows that nothing truly dies; it transforms. There is no end to our wandering, our moaning, but we would be much happier if we could learn to put aside our sense of our self-importance and accept our transience. Life is fleeting; enjoy the moment as it fades.
No achievement, literary or otherwise, however, occurs in a vacuum. Rattigan has surrounded himself with a team of experienced editors and poet-translators from Paris to Toronto. Paul Stubbs and Blandire Longre of The Black Herald Press, along with Agnes Cserháti, owner and chief editor of Rufus Books, have backed him from his earliest poetic efforts and this support is ongoing. When a poet writes verse this complex and on the edge, good editors become vital arbiters. as grass becomes flesh is a unique and compelling collection, one that continues to resonate in the mind long after reading.
Colin Carberry is a poet and translator. Among his full-length translations are Love Poems by Jaime Sabines (Biblioasis). Carberry’s work can be found in digital and print journals and newspapers such as Poetry Ireland Review, El Universal (Mexico), The High Window Journal, The Irish Times and Exile: The Literary Quarterly. A collection of his poems in Spanish translation is forthcoming.