Maria Taylor reviews
Kidland and other
Poems
By Paul Kingsnorth
Paul Kingsnorth’s debut collection Kidland
and other Poems is nature poetry with teeth. These poems eschew
sentimentality or mere description and instead are characterised by
radicalism. ‘It is often that I hate my Humanity,’ writes Kingsnorth, yearning
for a natural world which is unspoilt by human destruction. In this respect,
his poetry is underpinned with a sense of loss as well as anger.
Ecopoetry
is, arguably, relatively new and marked by presenting ‘distinctly contemporary
problems and issues’, as J. Scott Bryson has noted in his introduction to the
genre. Kingsnorth’s poetry could be deemed as ‘anti-humanist,’ as well as
ecological. Kidland longs for a
return to a pre-human history, calling upon ‘dark gods’ to re-establish the
order of nature:
There
is a heavy, heartless beauty anchored
in
the black soils of Europe,
silent
and uncaring, overlooked
by
its busy patrons, waiting
as
the Earth turns toward the dark.
There’s a sense of prophecy
here, suggested by ‘waiting,’ and of coming change, of ‘something in the air’
(a title of one of the poems), that will overcome human cruelty.
For Kingsnorth, poetry is an elegy
for nature or a sounding board for the poet’s disgust at human complacency. Kingsnorth
asserts that words have limitations, no doubt because they are man-made: ‘...the
shape / is unnatural, it is words only, and the world’s greatness / will not
fit.’ These lines are from the opening
poem, ‘The Tower,’ introducing many of Kingsnorth’s preoccupations from the
very start. Despite doubting the capabilities of language, Kingsnorth perseveres,
attempting to use poetry in order to ‘bring out the Wild.’ The views put
forward are uncompromising; human civilisation is a ‘disease’ which ‘dulls
everything.’ This is not faint-hearted poetry. Opinions are inflexible and there is little subtlety here, noticeably
in lines where ‘poison’ is revealed as humanity’s malign ‘gift to the
world.’
Kingsnorth himself is a controversial
ecological figure, branded by The New
Statesman in 2001 as one of the UK’s ‘top ten troublemakers,’ a redoubtable
label by anyone’s standards. As a poet,
Kingsnorth uses words to vent his anger at the violence wrought upon nature, by
humanity, maybe even by you:
You are clever and hungry and foul breathed.
You will kill because you must.
You
are human.
This simultaneously
apportions blame on human civilisation, whilst asserting that human beings are
simply programmed to be arrogant and destructive. It is, of course, the use of ‘you’ which makes
this accusation more personal. Here, and throughout Kidland, there is an
obvious reliance on pronouns to reinforce meaning and opinion. The poetry is
peppered with pronouns, such as ‘You,’ ‘We,’ ‘Us’ and a ubiquitous ‘I.’ This
creates heavy stresses, reminiscent of Old English forms at times, but without
the constraints of metre. In ‘The Bird Killer,’ these stresses are combined
with visceral imagery. Here, a hunter
stalks a pheasant squatting ‘deep in the guts of the hedge’ and ends its life
uncaringly with a malign ‘twist’:
I am the stone spirited, the bird
killer.
Life is distant from me, I am above
it.
Overusing
pronouns makes for an abrasive and aggressive tone. The ‘you,’ which even
Kingsnorth admits sounds like an ‘accusation,’ won’t be to everyone’s taste and
the rhetoric might be too heavy for those who prefer a lighter tone. Still it
raises an interesting discussion on the use of ‘you.’ Is the poet angry with us, or are we the converted?
The
long narrative poem ‘Kidland’, from which the collection takes its title, is
named after the vast man-made forest in Northumberland. This serves as the location for a lone figure,
named Roland, who tries to live in a ‘utopia of one,’ but his experiment fails
when he is killed at the end. Perhaps Roland, if you excuse the pun, is kidding himself that he can find a world
that has been lost. Is this poetry of a lone
and alienated voice?
It is only through loneliness that
you meet the world
on equal terms, on anything like
equal terms.
With such a strong focus on
ecological issues it sometimes feels as if the musical elements of the poetry
are lacking. The following lines from the ‘Kidland’ poem feel more like prose: ‘and knowing what and not
wanting to, and all of this she felt / as if it were her kneeling cold and
white, angry and disgusted and thrilled / on the stinking sponge of the dead
forest floor.’ There isn’t a delicacy of sound here, and lines are sometimes
too long to suit the demands of meaning, rather than carefully controlled. That’s not to say that Kingsnorth is incapable
of writing with tenderness, but this tenderness is only for the natural world:
and night comes and I rise and move
towards the trees
I hope they will have their way soon
and
I tell them so
There
are shades of Ted Hughes in some of these poems, perhaps in terms of their
conceits rather than their writing. In his later writing, Hughes often expressed
disgust at man’s contempt for nature and the environment and did so succinctly
and evocatively. Hughes also wrote elegantly about the anthropomorphism of
animals and gave them voices. Kingsnorth similarly creates animal voices in his
poetry – voices which it is the poet’s responsibility to translate: ‘Crows do
not speak, he said / except in poems.’ These voices expose animal suffering:
Man, you are grounded also, let us
exchange
pity. Greatly you have sinned
against us. Still
I am grateful for the warmth of
these hands.
As a minor point I’m
not fully convinced by the line endings here. In terms of imagery, however, there
is something rather moving about a man cradling a dying bird in his hands, with
‘its feathers’ coated in ‘the dark beauty of an oil slick.’ Here, it is almost
as if Kingsnorth suggests there can be some reconciliation between humans and
other living beings, and perhaps through poetry this can be realised.
What struck me about Kingsnorth is
his vibrancy and strength of opinion. This isn’t somnambulant poetry about
making dinner or being a teenager with a broken heart; this is poetry which exhibits
powerful and radical opinions about ecology. As for the quality of writing, the
register remains fixed throughout and perhaps the writing needs to enjoy
language more and play with meanings, sounds and form. Nevertheless it is worth
applauding Kingsnorth for making poetry an active force for change, even if
‘utopia’ has not yet been realised.
Maria Taylor is a poet and reviewer who lives in
Leicestershire, her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and a
collection is forthcoming with Nine Arches Press. She blogs at: http://miskinataylor.blogspot.com/
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