The Last Days of Petrol by Bridget Khursheed
The cover of this new collection by awardwinning poet Bridget Khursheed features her own image of Selkirk swimming pool in the rain and a quote from her, describing her interest in “ecopoetry, and the teetering intersections between landscape, nature and population”.
It’s a vivid introduction to a slim but powerful volume, full of nature poetry that is nonetheless charged with a sense of nature as something now permanently under pressure from human activities, which have to be observed alongside it and intertwined with it, if we are to make any sense of a world on the edge of crisis.
It’s a strategy that challenges the traditional role of the natural world in literature, as a kind of unchanging template against which human activity can be measured; but at its best it produces brave, chilling poetry, which almost forces a recognition of the new precarity of human life on earth, through the sheer texture and truthfulness of its language and verse.
Always there is a sense of a poetry rooted in Khursheed’s intense knowledge of the physical world of which we form part; the dozens of species of birds and mammals, insects, plants, seeds and moulds that now cohabit with the plastics and tarmacs of our urban world, and are changed by them. The syntax of her work is bold, and often difficult to disentangle, the ends of lines often breaking and disrupting thoughts, or seeming to rearrange them.
In the end, though, the boldness, the occasional obscurity and the sense of disruption seems mind-breakingly and heartbreakingly right, for a collection of poetry that can plunge into the most breathtaking detail of an encounter with a single dragonfly on a doorpost; but that never allows us to relax into the illusion that he and his kind will not be threatened or changed, by the fate that we humans ultimately inflict on ourselves.
A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe
FABER & FABER, £14.99 (EBOOK, £8.99) REVIEW BY ALAN JONES
White Debt: The Demerara Uprising and Britain’s Legacy of Slavery by Thomas Harding
Around the time slave trader Edward Colston’s statue was toppled in Bristol, Thomas Harding discovered his family’s involvement in the slave-dependent tobacco industry in the 19th century. This sparked him to write White Debt, a history of the 1823 slave uprising in British Demerara (modern Guyana), but also a reflection on the question of national guilt and the legacy of British slavery. Harding gives a simple but engaging account of events, while also reflecting on the historian’s role in shaping history. In between the narrative, he thoughtfully relates his family’s story, his own feelings and those of Guyanese interviewees on the subject of slavery’s legacy.