Building Worlds

…we can live together in

Hello there –

I hope this finds you doing okay, as you read this, and enjoying your July, wherever you are. For me, the summer is often a time with fewer work commitments so there’s more space to catch up on reading. One year I did the Sealey Challenge – reading a book of poetry every day throughout August – but, although I was glad of the spur to ‘get through’ my backlog of collections, I found it a bit of a hurtle. I prefer to read slowly and savour the words and lines, the poems on the page, pausing here and there to thread them through my days, knowing full well how much work goes into making a book reach that state of resolution and intent.

I’ve recently read three poetry books in a row that seem to connect in a beautifully mycorrhizal way and I felt drawn to let you know a bit about them here. No one’s asked me to write this – this isn’t a critical review as such, more a notice. I am aware poetry reviews are shrinking as rapidly as Greenland glaciers, at the same time as more and more books and pamphlets seem to be published. It’s a shame for any collection to be met with silence or remain hidden from view, especially ones like these that deserve to find their way into as many hands and heart-minds as possible. The first one came out a decade ago (and so has a degree of pre-pandemic etc innocence) but the other two are fresh off the press and available from your local bookshop or bookshop.org.

Model City by Donna Stonecipher (Shearsman 2015) is a witty, ambitious book. High-concept and very cool, its tight structure allows for moments of sudden openness, vulnerability, tenderness and quiet despair, and occasional awkward constraint. The 72 pieces are arranged as prose 3-liners set out in four sections separated by asterisks, each beginning: ‘It was like…’, in response to the question posed at the start of the book – ‘What was it like?’

This follows an epigraph from Le Corbusier – ‘We are waiting for a form of town planning that will give us freedom.’ And so we are presented with an existential, philosophical inquiry considered through an explicitly urban filter. All the significant referents are human constructs. From my own field-dwelling perspective, I couldn’t help wondering if we could ask ourselves the same question about our relationship with the countryside – are we also waiting for a form of countryside planning (ecological management perhaps) that will give us freedom? I might dig into that at another time.

Reading Model City was pleasurable and compelling, like walking around a city, noticing different things, depending on whether it’s a place familiar to you or a new discovery. Settling on riveting details – architectural, structural, interior/exterior, historical etc – the collection interrogates the ideal versus the actual, what is real and what is possible. This is the paradox of Form and Emptiness – where things are both present and absent, perfect as they are and allowing room for improvement.

I kept getting flashbacks to Calvino’s scintillating Invisible Cities, which seems like a direct forebear of this book in its intimate musings, apparently about one thing, though really about another (and both things, and all things).

As well as the repeated formal structure across the collection, layers of repetition occur within each piece, as if suggesting that various iterations of the city need to be built to create what we perceive as ‘the city’. It also reflects how, in pursuit of our own ‘ideal’, whatever that might be, we must try different things, explore a range of possibilities, till we ‘arrive’ at some clarity or insight, a deeper understanding. These repetitions reflect how we think, how we attempt to articulate ourselves to ourselves and others.

The book asks what happens when we notice where the micro and the macro touch, how our bodies and minds respond to different spaces. What does our experience tell us about the historical past, the worlds we’ve inherited and are remaking to pass on? With their proliferating hotels, like an invasive species, and the pull and press of global capitalism, these glimpses of various (possibly even imaginary) cities seem at some distance from Le Corbusier’s ideal of freedom. We can see ourselves in the mirror of the city and all its poor choices. Donna Stonecipher invites us to face up to how much we are we able to be present with the city’s vacancies and its claustrophobia, as well as our own shadowy inner spaces.

I read it not long after Olivia McCannon’s The Lives of Z (Pavilion 2025) and the two books talk to each other, at least in my mind, in all sorts of intricate ways. Though they both imagine the concept of possible ‘ideal’ futures, in her book, Olivia takes on the bold experiment of actually building one. It’s a breathtakingly inventive collection, reconfiguring language itself to help create an alternative world, more on the side of life, a riposte to the destructive, polluting, extractivist, colonial systems we’re picking up the bill for. Her quest is for

…a growchange word

to make the time-space-

shape of liberty

‘Pod

[coeur de la mer]’

Québécoise writer, poet, (eco)feminist) Louky Bersianik (1930-2011) is an important influence, honoured in the collection’s epigraph: Transgresser, c’est progresser. There is a prescient fury burning through these poems that is radically transgressive – and transformative, creative – an energy reminiscent of the speculative work of Ursula Le Guin.

I love how the book is full of matter, in the plethora of physical and biological detail, and so communicates what really matters. The titular Z is life itself – a ‘translator, multi-being, a plural persona, an open experiment…Biosphere and technosphere simultaneously.’

[My dictation autocorrect is struggling with these poets’ lexicons, which I only sense as A Good Thing – e.g. ‘technosphere’ = ‘Texas fear’.]

Once Z kicks in to full ‘translation’ mode (and it’s no accident that McCannon herself is a translator), a new sense of being is born, requiring new pronouns for the ‘zlings’ – whether human (‘humes’) – _zI, _zwe, _zthey, _zyou – or every living thing – zoe and zoa – all together under the umbrella of/in the service of life.

Embodying irrepressible biodiversity, the poems take multiple forms, some recognisable (diary, translation, question, letter etc) and some entirely context-specific, making new patterns on the page – print fading or including drawings (damaged insects crawling…) or graphs. And an optician’s chart:

US poet Jorie Graham has pointed out that, in an out-of-balance world governed by so-called reason and fatal injustice, the Climate Crisis is a crisis of the imagination. In their experiments in world building, both Olivia McCannon and Donna Stonecipher recognise intuitively, imaginatively and empathetically that a sturdy vessel (translated into poetic form) is needed to carry us through what’s happening on our planet and in our culture now.

As does Éireann Lorsung in the last book I’ll mention here, the one I read first in this tranche of summer reading. Pattern-book (Carcanet 2025), as well as elegantly exhibiting diverse, unexpected forms (while often returning to the sonnet), interprets form as pattern, as you might expect from a poet who is also a visual artist. Patterns involve repetition – the repetition we perceive in ‘nature’ that brings us constantly changing news about how things grow, where we are and who we are with, who we are parted from. There is beauty here and cleverness, a delicious, life-affirming lightness, full of a child’s wonder at how, even in an urban environment, the sap-filled organic manages to push through the cracks.

It's divided into four sections – ‘Spelling’, ‘Drawing’, ‘Singing’ and ‘Elegies’ – pointing to different ways of appreciating, remembering, understanding and expressing the world, as witnessed from vividly evoked locations in the US and Europe. Alongside astonishment at the seasonal cycles of the natural world, art and literature offer another reliable source of illumination and encouragement. The visionary spirit of Emily Dickinson in particular vibrates, ghostly and true, in and between the lines.

Like each of the other two books, there is a strong sense-making/making-sense impulse, interrogating the world by looking at it very closely. However, this is a less concept-driven collection: pattern is a subtle, essential motif rather than a strict organising principle, running through everything, keeping all life’s elements in non-anthropocentric balance. The epigraph [autocorrect = ‘epic graph’] evokes the flavour of Lorsung’s intention:

Pattern, like a magnetic field,

is passionate in restraint

Veronica Forrest-Thompson’s ‘Contours – Homage to Cézanne’

As you can probably tell, I relished being taken behind the scenes into these poets’ minds and notebooks via their epigraphs – each one properly epigrammatic, offering a stimulus to my own thinking, as well as shedding light on their odysseys. What does freedom look like now? What could it look like? Ditto transgression and progress, or passion and restraint. And how do we know what things are or were or will be like?

Similar to McCannon’s collection, Lorsung’s poems are full of the stuff of life, the forensic detail of ordinary things made extraordinary as they come and go across the poet’s horizon – tea, bicycles, family, weather, trees, music, windows, friendship, flowers, loss. ‘…– I know things change,/that pattern is our life.’ (‘Sonnet in Early Spring’).

One exquisite poem, ‘Simile’, circles round serendipitously to the theme of the ideal in Model City and the translation trope in The Lives of Z:

There’s an overwhelming amount to read these days online and in printed books so this must be enough for now – thanks, if you’ve stayed this far. There’s much more I could say, but the books themselves do it so much better. I recommend you add one or all of them to your own summer reading pile.

I find it heartening to be able to think along with what these clear-eyed, deft and resourceful poets are doing. What could be better than looking, responding, caring, choosing to create rather than destroy, trying and failing, knowing that is how a self, a world, is made, using the materials at our disposal – books, buildings, birdsong – and our own natural exuberance.

Tell me, what books – poetry or otherwise – have you been enjoying this summer?

L

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