ABOUT THE BOOK
Landsick, Genevieve Carver. Available here. Published by Broken Sleep Books.
MICROREVIEW BY TOM ENGLAND
Landsick has its germ in Carver’s own immersion in the Yorkshire coast, her collaboration with marine biologists at the University of Aberdeen, and affinity with the North Sea. It’s obvious that Carver takes this kind of poetic fieldwork seriously.
But rather than navigating the well-trodden path of marvelling at nature’s beauty, mourning its loss, and so on, Landsick avows that our engagement with nature is impossible to disentangle from the fact that we are engaging with it, filtering what we see through a lens coloured by our cultural experiences, and emotions.
There’s a humorous dissonance when a hermit crab is compared to a contestant on 90s-era Stars in Their Eyes,
blowing kisses to the scallops crying Tonight Matthew, I will be ME!
But elsewhere, this lensing is flipped in poems like Landsick’s opening, ‘Embrace,’ which begins
We are langoustines feeling
for love on the ocean floor
Far from the anthropomorphizing of other nature poets, Carver is more interested in metamorphizing; less projecting, more becoming.
This mutability pretty well describes the sea itself – yearned for throughout Landsick – being at once whole, but in motion, continually shifting its internal makeup, a state in which change is accepted and embraced.
Contrast this with the fact that the speaker, in those poems exploring displacement, seems constantly vomiting. In ‘Octopus’, for example, she
somehow could not prevent her stomach
from trying to leap from her mouth
and in ‘A Week Spent Leaving You,’
our conversation
is sick all over itself
The lurching line breaks underline our human discomfort with change and desire for stability – if only we were like the ocean, at peace with endless unsettledness.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Tom England teaches and writes in the North West of England. He is the editor at Night Owl Books, which publishes the literary and arts magazine The Greenhouse, published twice a year and sold at HOME, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UNITOM and other outlets across the North West of England. Night Owl Books has to date published two collections of poetry, Darlings, deletions by Lisa Matthews and Rhymes for Young Nature Lovers by Sarah Taylor-Fergusson. Tom’s poetry has most recently been published in Confingo, Clockhouse and Atlas & Alice.
Website: nightowlbookshop.com
Twitter: @greenhousemags
Instagram: @thegreenhousemagazine
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