Philip Gross

These poems, and a book-full more* related to them, were a gift of the pandemic – a disastrous time for most people in most ways, but it both trapped us at home, my wife and me, and brought all engagements to a halt, yet set us free for the amount of walking we could do direct from home. 

The edgelands round our small town of Penarth, on the South Wales coast, were likewise being brought to a halt. Abandoned fields, earmarked for a building development, two or three years since they had been farmed and with every wildflower, crop or weed that ever grown there rushing back to see what foothold they could gain. First we explored the fields, then pushed through into the expanding and deepening thicket; we picked up secateurs and cut our way through nettles, brambles and feral buddleia that swarmed the long-closed railway line and former quarry sites.

In most of the UK, you meet trees as woodland, neatly fenced and contained, or as a forestry plantation. This was starting to look like something else, like medieval wildwood, going its own way in life. Least of all was it under any obligation to be pretty, or to be convenient for us. And as far as we ducked, threaded and snipped our way into it, we were meeting it on its own terms. 

It won my respect. The genuinely fearsome self-defence of blackthorn, the vaulting, abseiling hawsers of encroaching bramble, the even-handed intertwining of living and dying in a thicket’s natural life, all showed us humans up as brittle, fickle, presumptuous splinters off the tree of life. We were getting a glimpse of the post-human, half an hour’s walk from home.

I don’t claim that my human language can get inside the mind, the whole sensorium, of plant or animal; I do think that by close description on the one hand and the imaginative echolocation of association, metaphor and simile, we can trick ourselves into standing outside our conscious minds for moments – to catch sight of ourselves as figures in a landscape, clumsy, clever and a bit bewildered. If we trust the poems to see better than us, to make natural associations that don’t simply follow our conscious beliefs, then we can be surprised. All of these are only glimpses, each one from its one angle, but by knowing they are partial and provisional, by moving straight on – look, here’s another angle… and another – we can stumble just a little closer to the otherness of things.

*The Field, the Wood, the Way, forthcoming from Bloodaxe Books in Autumn 2027