nature, people

"A tree of hands": beech pollard in Epping Forest

[Image source: https://blog.rowleygallery.co.uk/two-days-in-epping-forest/ . One of many wonderfully crafted and wide-ranging posts by Chris Hamer.]

Just a short one to recommend The Willowherb Review, a new journal of writing on eco-literary themes by people of colour:

https://www.thewillowherbreview.com/

The title of course fed into my current obsession with willowherbs but the writing within soon attracted me for its own sake. (I'm rushing this out but I'll add some more if I get a moment from playing in the Bank Holiday sunshine.)

In the first number, Michael Malay's piece on eels in the Severn is wonderful, and I very much like his perceptions about the hostile architecture ("defensive architecture")  that's used to control both people and nature.

Here's an impressive essay by the same author that I discovered later:
http://sheffieldanimals.group.shef.ac.uk/bearing-witness-to-a-disappearing-world-poetry-in-a-time-of-mass-extinction-by-dr-michael-malay/

Haines City, Florida, in Jennifer Neal's powerful memoir of her grandfather:

Today, every house window is covered in iron bars, but then, it was nothing but farmland, rich and dark like blackstrap molasses. He built a small house next to a large citrus grove where he immediately started working as a fruit picker, climbing trees to pull lemons, oranges and grapefruits from their prickled leaves until the oil from the rinds coloured his fingernails a permanent shade of yellow, and curled the flesh on his fingers into little brown ribbons. During the day, under the eye of a white foreman, his German shepherd, and the brutal Florida sun, my grandfather laboured long hours. His clothes stuck to his skin, and his limbs went numb from exhaustion. At night, he sat in a rusty aluminum tub in his backyard and watched the clouds transpose from shades of magenta, to violet, orange, and eventually black. 

Haines was no picnic, but compared to the Jim Crow hatefulness of his Georgia birthplace, this was liberation.

The second number is focussed on Epping Forest (playing into another current preoccupation of mine: much of Barnaby Rudge is set in Chigwell, just on the edge of the forest).

Beginning of the poem "if still forest (winter)" by Pratyusha:



making less of the body / worlding: the swallowing of green light

            the thin fog of a season’s turn / pungent fragrance in Epping, nineteen

                        translation as a means for survival / terrestrial seeking what-has-been



fleshy fibres separating skin / roots of blood-current

            veins / moss glimpsed through protective barriers, your thin skin

                        masquerading parchment / felled branch landing into a blueprint



new reckonings through the smell of birch / deodar-song or.

            brief loss, trying not to count / mapping leaves & dull brown

                        collateral damage we could never unsee / overhead, turned down


I appreciate the Alex La Guma allusion in the second line!

Pratyusha is also co-editor of another eco-literary magazine, amberflora:
https://www.amberflora.com/

In which, a rapid glance took me to some more exciting poetry, by Alycia Pirmohamed:
https://www.amberflora.com/issues/issue-7/alycia-pirmohamed-two-poems/