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Five poetry books to inspire your winter wanderings

Posted on Arts, Arts and social sciences

Whether you love poetry or are new to it, dip into the collections suggested by Dr Wanda O’Connor, Lecturer and Staff Tutor in Creative Writing at The Open University. These books can help us explore the way we live and respond to nature, enhancing our walks and rest stops along the way. As poet Philip Gross writes, the forest has been ‘waiting for us, all this time’. Wanda singles out a few companions:


1. The Commons, Stephen Collis, (published by Talonbooks, 2008)

In this collection Stephen Collis invites us to be architects of our own wandering, where:

‘we walk a line
erasing it as we go’
.

He writes of poet John Clare, a Northamptonshire peasant poet, who was compelled by his separation from family to walk 80 miles home from his private asylum at Epping. Clare:

‘returned home out of essence
till daylight and fell

down on a flint heap’

He later talks of how Clare sampled the hearty grasses along his way:

‘myself eating the grass
tasting something of bread’.

Collis also refers to 17th century Wigan-born textile trader Gerrard Winstanley who fought alongside others to resist land enclosure. Winstanley believed that:

‘the earth was made to be a common treasury of relief for all.’

Alongside other voices of the common people – known as the “Diggers”, Clare and others upturned newly installed fences to reclaim “the commons”:

‘their lakes too many to name’.  

2. Dart, Alice Oswald, (published by Faber, 2010)

Oswald gives voice to Devon’s River Dart, opening at Dartmouth and spilling into moorland. Dart is not unlike a person, where the poet suggests:

‘all voices should be read as the river’s mutterings’.

This river is active and thriving, full of fish and welcoming wild swimmers. Oswald asks the river walker to notice their own ‘lines and the rhythms of their speech’ as having the ‘syntax of the river in them’.

Moving upriver, the poems explore the reeds and banks, the ‘one step-width water’ that spins and splits and mends. Dress accordingly, ‘wear green for the sake of kingfishers’ and explore the river’s personality in the ‘real Dart’, which:

writhes like a black fire, smelling of fish and soil
and traces a red leaf flood mark
and catches a drift of placer gold in her cracks’.

3. Winter Migrants, Tom Pickard (published by Carcanet, 2016)

From sea to summit, Pickard roots through the North Pennines searching for raptors and that quintessential instinct to inch closer to the ‘moth eaten’ and ‘threadbare’ clouds, with Pickard’s forms:

‘spun across
a bullish moon’.

His is a world of slips and misses, as one might spy an elusive bird and think it ‘the same bird, always ahead of me, just out of sight’. Pickard invites us to ‘enjoy the gloaming’ of field and estuary, where:

‘the edge of everything is nothing
whipped by wind’
.

The poet embraces Solway Firth’s ‘fast cold Atlantic wind’, mapping his own heart against the brace of gale:

‘my heart, the cartographer, charts
to the waterline,
is swept back as the tide turns’.

One can pause for reflection in these poems, holding to the purpose of each ‘measured step’ of the journey:

‘when a mind seeks
to know itself
the last place it looks
is the body’.

4. Footnotes to Water, Zoë Skoulding, (published by Seren Books, 2019)

From the culverted River Adda in Bangor, Wales to the Bièvre – a lost Parisian stream, Skoulding beckons readers to observe at ‘eye level’ how water moves, patterns, and ‘undoes us’:

‘Not a trace but the same line writing itself
over and over again’.

These poems move between cityscapes and the sea exploring everyday views, as in the poem Gull Song: ‘we came further in gathering your waste in our plastic beaks we are rhythm distributed in space’.

Skoulding presents the charismatic gull – showing patterns of decline in nature, as the “leftovers”: ‘we are just too much and we live in the too much of the takeaway’.

The poet asks us to take time for what has come before – ‘the dried up rib of a river’, and to observe how ‘water takes the quickest route’ or ‘gets caught on the surface’.

5. A Fold in the River, Philip Gross and illustrated by Valerie Coffin Price (published by Seren Books, 2015)

This beautiful book features illustrations by Coffin Price where images and photographs are overlain by handwritten phrases. Gross’s poem Five Takes on the Taff – featuring the River Taff that flows north from Cardiff with fish like ‘sinewy dreams’ heading ‘upstream home to Merthyr’, playfully situates the river as ‘wide skirt[ed]’, with:

‘many petticoats
of catchment round her’.

Gross vividly shows us the river’s start, the ‘carbon / swamp-forests’ fixed ‘in a black seam like fossilised lightening’ that asks us for pause to be ‘in the grip of it’.

Join Gross in noting slopes and hillsides ‘losing its grip, dissolving inwardly’, and listening closely for the ‘constant ripple of applause come from the shingle-shallows’.

Main picture: Nejc Kosir for Pexels