How to save a river
Take a young girl, six or seven,
and have her mother make one last sweep
of a net in the black pool:
a mating pair of crested newts.
Bring them home and build an aquarium
long before this is against the law
where the female lays little by little
the white embryos in a sac among the weeds.
Wait seventy years
and the woman who was the girl will recall
the larvae, keel-tailed, feathery
and so lucid she could watch their bodies working
within them, the daphnia packed
into the gut, as they gushed into efts –
a word you’ll think translucent.
Then she’ll describe how this morning
she was at the river early
taking a sample of the sediment,
light through the trees an immersion,
how everything comes back to water.
Our winner this year showed vast creativity, great play and skilled control in How to Save a River. The uncertainty of place and time in this collection, full as it is of constant movement - alongside the straightforward stoppings of grief found in Signs of life, River deep, mountain high and The current - felt a fitting tribute to the crossovers between world and individual which we all navigate.
These are moving and surprising poems. They lament the degradation of river habitats whilst elegising, too, the loss of a parent. We visit a fire in Cyprus, becks and rivers in the Lake District and the US. Animals of water swim through much of the pamphlet: eels, smolts, efts, crayfish, the salamander. Among this burgeoning life, the strange face of loss is never far from sight. This means that the poems achieve a lovely, multifaceted evocation of human interactions with the life of water, an element from which, finally, strength, comfort and no small degree of hope are drawn.
The title poem exemplifies all this, setting the life of a woman, six- or seven-years-old at the beginning of the poem but glimpsed again after seventy years, remembering the larvae of crested newts:
keel-tailed, feathery
and so lucid she could watch their bodies working
within them, the daphnia packed
into the gut, as they gushed into efts –
a word you’ll think translucent.
There’s a beautifully delicate translucency to the wide-ranging and powerfully arranged poems of this pamphlet. Without having to moralise or even raise their voice, these memorable poems make themselves heard.
