The Fifty-year Traffic Jam

Charlotte Eichler’s poems take place in the natural world, but her vision of the pastoral is a modern one. Her poem “The Fifty-year Traffic Jam” is a case in point. Here, a line of rusting, rotting cars is slowly disintegrating into the landscape it once disrupted. It’s a Ballardian vision of man’s hubris: however destructively we treat the world, it can wait us out. “The Fifty-year Traffic Jam” is taken from Eichler’s recently published pamphlet Their Lunar Language (Valley Press, £5.99).

sits tyre deep in sphagnum moss surrounded by cracked glass and rusting fern.

In spring, blue tits hurl themselves at wing mirrors

and oily pools collect electric dragonflies with copper wire wings.

The forest drinks them in, sucks up radiator fluid and cogs –

its creaking branches sound more metallic by the day.