Contemporary Nature by matthewwigelsworth

Contemporary Nature

Artists inside a world of crisis.

ESSAY Robert Macfarlane Why we need nature writing 3 Kerri nÃ Dochartaigh The Winter Spring 9

POETRY Alice Oswald Dunt: a poem for a dried up river 15 Chris Poundwhite Ash Tree 18 Sumana Roy I Want To Be a Tree 19 Joseph Fasano Hermitage 21 Elizabeth Jane Burnett from, Swims 22 Kim Hyesoon The Poet and the Glamour Girl Go on a Hike 25

FLASH FICTION

Claire Miye Stanford Neither Above nor Below 26

SHORT STORY Benjamin Myers A Stone Statue in The Future 29

PHOTOGRAPHY Anke Butawitsch 34 Armand Sarangue 35 Ignacio Palacios 36 Rowena English 37 David Frutos Egea 38 Justin Hofman 39 James Bell 40

Robert Macfarlane: why we need nature writing A new “culture of nature” is changing the way we live – and could change our politics, too.

In 1972, Gregory Bateson published Steps to an Ecology of Mind, a collection of his essays from the previous three decades. Bateson was a dazzlingly versatile thinker, whose work shaped the fields of anthropology, linguistics and cybernetics, as well as the movement we now call environmentalism. Near the end of the book, Bateson deplored the delusion of human separation from nature. “We are not,” he warned, “outside the ecology for which we plan.” His remedy for this separatism was the development of an “ecology of mind”. The steps towards such a mind were to be taken by means of literature, art, music, play, wonder and attention to nature – what he called “ecological aesthetics”. Bateson, who died in 1980, would have been excited by what has happened in the culture of our islands over the past 15

years. An ecology of mind has emerged that is extraordinary in its energies and its diversity. In nurseries and universities, apiaries and allotments, transition towns and theatres, woodlands and festivals, charities and campaigns – and in photography, film, music, the visual and plastic arts and throughout literature – a remarkable turn has occurred towards Bateson’s ecological aesthetics. A 21stcentury culture of nature has sprung up, born of anxiety and anger but passionate and progressive in its temperament, involving millions of people and spilling across forms, media and behaviours. This culture is not new in its concerns but it is distinctive in its contemporary intensity. Its politics is not easily placed on the conventional spectrum, so we would do better to speak of its values. Those values include placing community over 3

commodity, modesty over mastery, connection over consumption, the deep over the shallow, and a version of what the American environmentalist Aldo Leopold called “the land ethic”: the double acknowledgement that, first, human beings are animals and, second, we are animals among other animals, sharing our habitat with members of the biota that also have meetable needs and rights. The outcomes of this culture have ranged from the uncountable enrichments of individual lives to clear examples of political and social change with regard to conservation and our relationships with “landscape”, in the fullest sense of the word. Co-operation is crucial. Poets are collaborating with educationalists, printmakers with permaculturists, dramaturges with climate scientists, filmmakers with folk singers, sculptors with physicians – all in a gumbo that would surely have met with Bateson’s approval, as would the underlying belief that, in Lucy Neal’s phrase, artists can be “agents of change”. Here are just a few examples drawn from my acquaintance. In terms of charities, I think of young organisations such as Action for Conservation, which seeks to inspire teenagers to become “the next generation of nature conservationists”, or Onca, which has the mission “to inspire creativity and positive action in the face of environmental change” by means of the arts. In terms of publications, I think of the journal Archipelago, or the magazine EarthLines, run, until recently, out of a croft in the Outer Hebrides and standing for “a land ethic”. In education, I think of the huge rise of forest schools; in theatre, of agile, agitating political companies including Metis Arts and the surge in British climate-change drama. In terms of campaigns, I think of Rewilding Britain, arising from George Monbiot’s

book Feral(2013) and seeking to replenish British biodiversity and “connect people with the wonder of nature”; the recent Hen Harrier Day, which brought together Chris Packham and Jeremy Deller to combat the extinction in England of these beautiful hawks as a result of the grouse-shooting industry; or the emerging New Commons campaign, with which I am involved, aiming for the creation of areas of common land around our biggest cities. In all of these cases, the natural good, cultural activity and human well-being are mingled rather than separable categories. As Ali Smith has observed, “The place where the natural world meets the arts is a fruitful, fertile place for both.” We might think of that place as an “ecotone” – the biological term for a transition zone between biomes, where two communities meet and integrate. That integration is excitingly visible on the Caught by the River website, where scientists and river restorationists share terrain with experimental musicians and urban birders. As a writer and an academic, I also think of books. W H Auden once said that, among scientists, he felt like “a shabby curate . . . [in] a roomful of dukes”. When I am with serious conservationists – the people at the delivery end of saving the planet – I often feel like that shabby curate. I also ask them what switched on their passion for protecting nature and the answer is almost always the same: an encounter with a wild creature and an encounter with a book. Literature has the ability to change us for good, in both senses of the phrase. Powerful writing can revise our ethical relations with the natural world, shaping our place consciousness and our place conscience. Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1999) prompted the revival of lido culture in Britain and the founding of the “wild swimming” movement. Richard Mabey’s 4

Nature Cure (2005) is recommended by mental health professionals. Chris Packham fell in love with wild cats and golden eagles because he read Lea MacNally’s Highland Deer Forest (1970), as a child growing up in suburban Southampton. “Nature writing” has become a cant phrase, branded and bandied out of any useful existence, and I would be glad to see its deletion from the current discourse. Yet it is clear that in Britain we are living through a golden age of literature that explores relations between selfhood, landscape and ethics and addresses what Mabey has described as the “growing fault line in the way we perceive and talk about nature”. I don’t know what to call this writing, nor am I persuaded that it needs a name. It is not a genre or a school. An ecology, perhaps? In the Guardian in 2003, I described what I saw as the green shoots of a revival of such writing. Twelve years on, those shoots have flourished into a forest, richly diverse in its understory as well as its canopy. I would love to name a hundred writers here but lists soon get boring. Let me indicate something of the range of what is being undertaken, however, by acclaiming non-fiction that reaches from George Monbiot to Kathleen Jamie, by way of Dave Goulson, Philip Hoare, Sara Maitland, Tim Dee and John Burnside, and includes Helen Macdonald’s soaring H Is for Hawk, as well as such giants as Mabey and Tim Robinson. In the past nine months alone, we have had Michael McCarthy’s moving memoir The Moth Snowstorm, Rob Cowen’s bold and beautiful Common Ground and James Rebanks’s The Shepherd’s Life, bringing in an important voice from the world of farming. In the coming months, we will have a defence of landscape “beauty” from Fiona Reynolds, a towering figure in British conservation, Nina Lyon’s pursuit of the

Green Man and Mabey’s botanical magnum opus, The Cabaret of Plants. The first-person voice is strong in many of these books – but it was also strong in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), a founding text of modern environmentalism. Indeed, it was so strong that the printer who typeset the first edition ran out of capital Is. Recent British poetry is deeply involved with landscape and nature, from Katrina Porteous on the Northumberland coast to Alice Oswald in Devon, by way of Debjani Chatterjee and Sean Borodale, to the experimental work of Richard Skelton, Autumn Richardson and Colin Simms’s lifelong project of natural-historical verse (see his recent Hen Harrier Poems). Fiction spans the rural violence of Cynan Jones and Ben Myers, through Kirsty Gunn, Laura Beatty, Melissa Harrison and Sarah Hall, all the way to China Miéville’s thrillingly weird prose. Alongside this new work has come the rediscovery of remarkable writing from the 19th and 20th centuries. Edward Thomas, J A Baker, Nan Shepherd and others have found fresh generations of readers, often thanks to the efforts of small publishers such as the superb Little Toller Books. The best of the recent writing is ethically alert, theoretically literate and wary of the seductions and corruptions of the pastoral. It is sensitive to the dark histories of landscapes and to the structures of ownership and capital that organise – though do not wholly produce – our relations with the natural world. One might as reasonably expect to meet the geographer Doreen Massey or the philosopher Gilles Deleuze in its pages as Gilbert White or the bar-tailed godwit. Nor does this literature advocate a Luddite environmentalism: it tends to be antitechnocracy but not anti-technology. Some of this writing is kick-up-the-arse furious, some is elegiac, some is about 5

disease and dispossession, some is about dignity and the deepening of knowledge. Across its range, moral engagement and hope are consistently in evidence. Every contemporary writer about nature of my acquaintance is not “only” a writer but is also involved in political agitation, campaigns and volunteer work on behalf of the living world. This is far from the caricature of the 18th-century picturesque, in which moneyed artists sketch the Wye while peasants expire at their ankles and gouty aristos gaze dreamily through their Claude glasses. Not everything in the forest is lovely and not all of this writing is to the taste of every reader. More voices need to be heard from ethnic-minority writers and from a wider range of identities and backgrounds. There could also be a lot more jokes. But there is no one true way of writing about nature and place. The tradition of such literature has always been, as I argued in 2003, “passionate, pluriform and essential”. Our contemporary version mixes ire, irony and the irenic; green ecologies with dark ecologies. It is the hopefulness, commitment and diversity of the current field that made Mark Cocker’s recent attack on it seem so disappointingly crabbed. In June, Cocker wrote an article for this magazine suggesting that the so-called new nature writers – including me and Helen Macdonald – were politically passive and insufficiently invested in the natural world. The standfirst asked: “How much do [these] authors truly care about our wild places?” Cocker went on to caricature much of the recent work as “pastoral narratives” that fail to engage with the “troubling realities” of modern Britain. Nature books, he wrote, must navigate “between joy and anxiety” (as if they didn’t already, obsessively) and must have “real soil” at their roots. Does

Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk – which never self-identifies as nature writing anyway – not have real soil at its roots in the form of her father’s sudden death and her grief? Implicit throughout Cocker’s article were the ideas that only those with “naturalist” knowledge should be writing about nature and that nature is a category confined to the non-human, as separable from “landscape” as “culture” is separable from “literature”. It was a regrettable piece of policing. Its manners were especially unfortunate, because at its heart Cocker – a fine writer and ornithologist – was asking valuable questions about how cultural activity connects to political change. He was right to sound the alarm for the living world but his suggestion that any literary engagement with nature must be noisily game-changing was wrong. Such an instrumentalising view subdues literature to a single end and presupposes a simplistic model of consequence: that Cultural Action A leads to Political Outcome B. The great American activist and writer Rebecca Solnit, a hero of mine, explains the limits of this view. “A lot of activists expect that for every action there is an equal and opposite and punctual reaction,” she writes in Hope in the Dark (2005), in a passage to which I find myself often returning: [They] regard the lack of one as failure . . . But history is shaped by the groundswells and common dreams that single acts and moments only represent. It’s a landscape more complicated than commensurate cause and effect. Politics is a surface in which transformation comes about as much because of pervasive changes in the depths of the collective imagination as because of visible acts, though both are necessary . . . Writers need to understand that action is seldom direct. You write your 6

books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them or they might just rot . . . Some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire. Numerous literary examples prove Solnit’s “indirect action” thesis. My favourite is that of John Muir, the Scottish-born father of American conservation. In 1869, Muir washed up in the Sierra Nevada range of California, where he took a job as a shepherd. His first summer in the mountains inspired him to write ecstatic essays about the landscape of the Sierra and the intrinsic value of nature. Years later, some of those essays were by chance read by Theodore Roosevelt, who was wonderstruck by them. He travelled to meet Muir in 1903 and the two men walked and talked for three days. Roosevelt went on to place the Yosemite Valley under federal protection and to sign into existence during his presidency five national parks, 55 national bird sanctuaries and 150 national forests. Muir’s writing lives on in today’s Britain in the form of the John Muir Trust, which campaigns to protect and enhance our wild places, and the John Muir Award, which has introduced 250,000 people in Britain to Muir’s philosophy of conservation (with over a quarter of those from disadvantaged areas or with disabilities). Literature usually works not in straight lines but in cat’s cradles of cause and effect. Vital connections sometimes manifest themselves only in retrospect – or even remain unseen. Here are some other, more direct examples. J A Baker’s book The Peregrine (1967) motivated a student of mine to join the protests at the Kingsnorth power station. Charles Rangeley-Wilson’s subtle book Silt Road (2013) was read by a council officer in High Wycombe and has energised plans to de-culvert the River

Wye in the town: what a joyous, unforeseeable outcome! My writing has led me into close collaborations with dozens of local protest groups, conservation charities and natureminded initiatives, not to mention its shaping of my work as a teacher. The idea of endorsing a naive pastoralism is anathema to me. In the same week as Cocker’s New Statesman piece was published, I was writing the script for an angry, hour-long documentary about oil, climate change and environmental damage in the Alaskan Arctic. I am currently working on a very short book about British nuclear bombs with the artist Stanley Donwood and a very long book about mining, death and underworlds. A fortnight after Cocker’s piece was published, the Guardian reviewed my most recent book, Landmarks, which is about community resistance, pollution and species loss, as well as language and landscape. The final lines of the article read: “Landmarks is a book that ought to be read by policymakers, educators, armchair environmentalists and active conservationists the world over. If we are to defend the land from further degradation, we have to begin by knowing what it is we are talking about.” *** Literature can lead to activism and can feed into policymaking. But as Jonathan Bate has written, it need not explicitly “pronounce an ecological message” to perform ecological work. Take Julian Hoffman’s finely focused essays in The Small Heart of Things (2012), or the sparsely contemplative poetry of Thomas A Clark. For both writers, concentration is an ethical act. With his tiny, delicate poems, Clark has said that he hopes to do nothing less vital than “celebrate the life around them”. In so doing, they ask readers to approach the living world not as 7

a standing reserve but as a precious gift. In Tim Dee’s striking phrase, “We need bird poems as much as [we need] the RSPB.” George Monbiot, another of my heroes, has written stirringly about why we “fight for the living world”: The reality is that we care because we love. Nature appealed to our hearts, when we were children, long before it appealed to our heads, let alone our pockets . . . Acknowledging our love for the living world does something that a library full of papers on sustainable development and ecosystem services cannot: it engages the imagination as well as the intellect. It inspires belief; and this is essential to the lasting success of any movement.

of “ecological aesthetics”. To see ourselves as within the ecology for which we plan, we require fury, burn, scorch and scour in our contemporary nature culture – but also wonder, joy, beauty, grace, play and concentration. We must bring about the “major reawakening by our political classes to the idea that civilisation is rooted in a genuine and benign transaction with non-human life”, as Cocker puts it. But this won’t be magically managed by a single silver bullet – rather by what the climate scientist Richard Somerville brilliantly calls “silver buckshot, the large number of worthwhile efforts that all need to take place”. So down with disdain and division, up with celebration and connection – and onwards in a hundred hopeful steps towards an ecology of mind.

Yes, yes and yes again. And literature is exceptionally good at acknowledging love, inspiring belief and engaging “the imagination as well as the intellect”. That is why we should welcome the full range

Kerri ní Dochartaigh: The Winter Spring

When I awoke on the extra day that this mirrored, mirroring year gave us – it was to the Winter – come back to me again so fiercely; full of ice – and dancing, piercing light. The week before, following two unbroken months of harrowing storms – I had held my breath, and silently cleared space inside of me – making room for the light of Spring. That aul’ man of darkness, the King of decay, was on the way out, I was so sure of it I nearly wept with relief. The sodden, lonely fields had had enough of his type – we all had; for many a moon to

come. There had been sun – full, ancient – for only a finger less than a handful of days, in the run up to the final, spectral day of February; so to find the ground outside my rotting , rattling window white and glistening like a dreamed fairy-tale – shocked me right to my bones. Winter – ghost-trace, moon-white, silent as the unimaginable moments after every storm – had arrived back to the laneway. I took the jumper back down from the top shelf, hauled out two pairs of socks, and dragged my tired body outside – into the space created by a day that is neither here

nor there, neither real nor imagined; a day more hidden inside of, rather than existing outside of, time. My first Leap Year on this isolated laneway, by the central Bog-land, in the quiet, solitary, heart of Ireland. Frost and ice, light and silence; crow-song that echoed all around me like a keen for something not quite lost. We arrive at the Milking Barn, the dog leaps ahead of me, as always – to find a shadow-show being played on the old tin sheets – blue as the sky now is, and just as exquisite; just as delicate. Grasses touched by diamonds; making silhouettes of their ethereal forms, as wrens flit from the gaps in a grey stone wall, into the thorns and brambles. The light and the ice are in it together; this thin, spare day exists, it feels – only in the space that lies before my shivery, grateful hands, as I try to record it all on my phone, doing no justice whatsoever to a single drop of it, a single drop of it at all. Normally we stay here, in this space behind the gate, in front of the stream, for only a minute or two. I circle the perimeters as the dog sniffs the shit of whatever creatures have spent the planet and moon-lit hours there; the night before our morning. Today, though, the light that has enveloped the milking barn is such that I can see no possibility of leaving it; its pull on me is like something else that I always thought had no equal or rival. The light refracting off freshly born frost, against a backdrop of broken, abandoned machinery – is calling to me, holding me in place. The light of the 29th of February this year, as if in some surreal and beautiful twist of time and place; is holding me in place like the Atlantic Ocean normally does, even though I am now further away from it that I can ever possibly be on this hinterland rock – at the very edge-land of Europe.

And so I find myself at the close of February 2020, in an utterly middle place, on a day in betwixt – desperately waiting for Spring to take the place of Winter – but rapt by the Winter’s light. the light the light the light the light; THE LIGHT. The light that I know I will never quite be able to name, to capture, to hold in my hands; this light whose veins course through this isolated space like a river making its way to the sea. And so, there – on that winter-fabled, frost-guest morning – I start to explore the Milking Barn, and the outhouses all around it; those wee hidden nooks, beneath fallen trees, and roofs caved in over the passing of the years. I pass the brown and blue tractor, I pass the brown anchor-like, unidentifiable machine opposite the briars, and I duck into the middle outhouse – the midnight blue starting to come to fruit on the ivy – stepping over glass and thickly crusted dirt, caked into wet rubbish – and there is a single vein of that light making its way into the small rectangle. There they sit, in the left hand corner, calling out to me – like the sea does, even in the darkness – like the light does, even in the dead of Winter; like all gifts, they have come from a place unseen, and a time unknown. I do not speak their language; still, though, I look and I listen. Still, though, I bring my grateful hands down – in a prayer that needs no name on which to fall. There are two of them, one is almost half the size of the other, and each has been as skilfully sculpted as the one beside it. The smaller is nestled safely inside the shadow cast by the larger one. They are not a pair, neither are they twinned with one another – yet their twoness, their togetherness, their unity – feels utterly impossible to deny.

I know that they have been crafted by the repeated movements of the bodies of birds. Through the continued, measured actions of their wee fine forms – turning and shaping the material that they themselves have meticulously gathered – sculpting a home for themselves; using their own selves to make their own place. In this newly fallen, ice-reflecting, vein of light; I look at the two abandoned nests at my feet, as though I am setting eyes upon a kind of beauty that I have never before known, and that I will never quite be able to forget. I am not quite sure why but all of a sudden I am crying. I have taken my phone out of my work-jacket, and I am typing what I know for certain are the first words of something – something new, and unnamed (untamed?) – into my notes: ‘I will make of this Winter, a feathered nook.’ I step back outside, into the frost that is starting to disappear like a boneless ghost. Into the light that is still falling on the milking barn; like a gossamer dream. II Laethanta na Riabhaiche : The Borrowed, Skinning Days I sat on the green, paint-chipped trailer by the red and cream milking barn beside my new home, for four hours on that extra day of February last month. I wrote by hand, until all the pale green ink in my pen had bled itself out onto the white page: nesting, extra day, lost months, stolen time, flock, flight, storms, flooding, childhood, watching the crows gathering sticks on Bute until I missed my ferry, flatness, curves, hollow, frost, ghosts, roots, lightlightlightlightlightlight, solitude, LIGHT

I wrote for that extra day and for the three days that followed it – the first three of March – words that have taken on so much more depth in the weeks that made up the third month this year. On the 4th I went back to other words – review work that had deadlines – words that had a concrete shape, and that followed a clear line; unlike those new words. Those other words that arrived – unbidden –not quite fully formed, in the frosty light of a milking barn, a space that is not even nearly mine; an abandoned, borrowed place. On the 7th I sent off a review for an exquisite gift of a book – Sara Baume’s handiwork – the last thing that I would ever write before the whole world as we know it changed shape and colour. My journal for the 8th of March would show a dark, fog-grey line if I allowed myself to reread it, something about there being a gap between the known and the unknown, and no light with which to navigate. The days from the 8th of March until this one, for us in this northerly, island dotted part of the world, have been steeped in the full, unimaginable debris – of a storm that showed no sign of arriving; that shows no indication of letting up. At the exact point of the year, in many parts of the UK and Ireland, when the actual, measureable, recordable, nameable storms looked as though they were on their way out, a pandemic – unlike almost everything we have ever known before – arrived. Spring came, and found us in behind closed doors – isolated and alone; those of us that can, and choose to, follow the advice we have been given. As if we have begun a second Winter. Every single year, when the ending of Winter comes, I forget how fully I can be tricked by the light. Spring always seems to be just there, right before my eyes, and then the wind and the rain – the sleet and the snow – the light that I remember can only be the light of Winter. The uncertain, tumultuous weather that marks the passage 11

from Winter to Spring on these islands often alights with us at the ending of March, and can stay right into April. We often witness a winter relapse, the embers of the darkest season not quite gone out; tended to – brought back to life – plunging us right back into the depths of the cold. When the Spring Equinox came this year, it felt almost surreal how bright, how warm – how Spring Spring Spring – it was. Then, two days later – on the 22nd, we found ourselves at the start of ‘The Borrowed Days’ – where I am from, at least. In the North of Ireland we seem to do extremes in ways that other parts of the world never quite try to rival. In Scotland, and in the South of Ireland, the borrowed days mostly refers to the last two days or March and the first two of April, but in the North of this island, we have a tale of nine days; borrowed from April – to kill and skin an old brindled cow. ‘Borrow’: ‘To take or receive something with the implied intention of returning it to its owner or the place where it belongs.. One can be ‘Living on borrowed time’.’ ‘To introduce words or ideas from another person or language into your own.’ In handiwork, Sara Baume writes of migration in a way that I have never thought of it before, and I cannot shake it from out of my insides: ‘There has to be one who rises first’ – talking of the individual bird, amongst an entire flock; the one that makes that first move. ‘There has to be one who rises first.’ I hope, and I trust, that she will not mind if I borrow these dancing, beautiful words – only for a wee while. When a friend sends me help to identify the moth in my lockdown kitchen, and attaches ‘photos of other moths she has taken – what she is really doing is sharing her hope. She is reminding me, in the third week of isolation, of the night she took my

picture in the bustling backstreets of Bristol, with my jacket completely covered in moths; in a December that feels three years ago – instead of the months it really is. She is saying: there are so many miles between us right now but I still see your moth, you still see mine. There are still moths, my friend is saying: there are still moths, and we still love them. She is saying: remember the resilience of small things. No matter how delicate you feel today, you have the wings to span vast oceans. What my beautiful friend is doing, is she is letting me borrow her deep wisdom – her gorgeous resilience; just when I need it the most. ‘There has to be one who rises first.’ When another friend sends me money, knowing that I am struggling and have noone that I feel close enough to ask, what she is saying is this: I am with you. I am miles across the sea but I am there with you, as your shoulders finally loosen themselves from their hold around your neck; for the first time in days. When my friend asks later for me to send her images of my home, what she is saying is: I will come to you. I will come across the sea to you, and you will come to me, and we will make space inside our homes for each other; as we have done inside our hearts. My friend is really telling me that I am safe. She is telling me that my cupboards will never be empty, like the abandoned nest I have packaged up to send her; she is loaning me that simple, unbreakable knowledge: that promises that everything is going to be OK. ‘There has to be one who rises first.’ Sometimes, moments come in our lives when it is very difficult – almost impossible – to return things to the people and the places in which they are deemed as ‘belonging’, as per the definition of ‘borrowing’.

In this wee stone cottage, I have seven library books that I have no idea when I will be able to return. I have words that belong to friends that I should be carrying with me on my person next week, across the sea, to Devon – for a project two years in the making; rescheduled by the artist for next year, in the hope that this will all pass soon. I have a friend who is held in Italy with her new partner, with no clue when she will return to Spain. Maybe when she eventually does, it will be to collect the rest of her belongings, and take them to the new place she may have already begun to belong to. She is planting seeds there, in the place she found herself when this storm hit – on every surface she can find, and I know when I see her hands working in this way; she, herself is putting down roots.

through masks and scarves – he’d bought fat-balls and nuts; seeds of various colours and sizes. He didn’t say anything, he just put them in the trolley, on the conveyor, in the bag, in the van, into the feeders, onto the table he had built them.

There are seeds in this house that should already be in the soil outside – soil that should already have had all the roots and broken glass removed by a loaned digger that is in a yard, patiently waiting; until who knows when. I don’t really know where those waiting seeds belong right now. They are on top of a bench my partner made for sitting on in the garden; a patch of land he hoped would already be clear by now. The bench is made from parts of salvaged decking, built by the previous owner, that rotted almost right through in the decade that the house lay empty. I fell through that decking, on the Autumn Solstice, and took it as the house’s way of asking me if I was really meant to be there; in the house my partner inherited, in a place to which I have absolutely no ties.

I cried when the birds came because I finally felt safe, somehow. There were so many of them, of so many different varieties. There were so many of them, and they squabbled and fought, bullied and dilly-dallied; they ate and they left. There were so many of them, and they came to our wee house, to where the rotted deck used to be, and they ate the food we gave them. They were golden and black with red heads, they were brown, they were burnt orange, they were green and yellow, green and green, blue and green, black and grey, pink and pewter, black and iridescent; they were gifts.

This year, on the Spring Solstice – after I’d had two full days of anxious, fearful howling, hours given over to weeping like a baby – my partner took the rest of that decking, and built a bird-table. The day before, as we’d made our way as quickly through the Supermarket as we could – all of us showing fear on our faces, even

When the birds came, I cried. I cried and cried and cried because of grief. Because of grief that is neither black nor white. Because of grief that is iridescent. I cried when the birds came because of grief that is all of the colours we already know, and all of the colours we do not yet know. I cried because of the loss, the fear, the worry; I cried for people and places – things and realities – that I both know and do not know. I cried because there is loss, sorrow and grief but there is still so much hope left, somehow.

When my partner built that table and bought food for those birds, what he was saying was: yes the world as we know it has changed beyond all words but there are things that need no words, there are still things that we can do; look at all those birds we never knew that there could be. He is saying that sometimes things break and smash and rot, and then the parts left over can be hammered into something new. What my partner was saying was that it takes so little, so very little indeed, to call the winged, coloured things down 13

from out of the sky. There is very little that we need to give that could change our days so fully, so completely – one day at a time; in such a way that might eventually change the world, and the passing of its time, as we know it. He is saying that there is much that we cannot control – much suffering that we would all give our all to stop, to ease, to undo – but that we our trying our best, these days. We are learning a little bit more every one of these borrowed days, what it means to be in community, what it means to look after one another; what it means to keep each other safe. ‘There has to be one who rises first.’ The thing is, that there can be no borrowing – no lending – in these days, held so closely in place; buried so deeply inside of time. A single room can feel like our entire world for the weeks that we must spend there, weeks might go by in the blink of an eye – or the fogyellow hour before dawn might feel like a long-drawn out Winter. What is given now is given freely and without expectation. What is given now asks for nothing back in return. What is given now is offered with open hands, a prayer sent out to every single one of us; I hope you are safe. What we give in these days will be the things we have been storing up since we were wee. What we give in these days will be the things that we have been gathering up for many years, the things that we have been learning how to do since time began; what we give in these days will be the gift of ourselves. When the time to act, to support, to be brave and be hopeful comes; it calls us from out of nests, and skies, and trees. It calls us up from mudflats and dirt, from desert and cliffs, from outhouses and from bodies of water. It calls us up from days full of wreck and ruin – fear and loss – worry and despair; it simply calls us. We are being asked to rise, to be brave enough to trust nothing other than the body we are in; our only safe home.

‘There has to be one who rises first.’ When the bird builds her nest in the tree, in the shed, in the eaves, in the dovecote, in the car engine, in the wellington, in the outhouse: she is not placing her trust in the space onto which she builds. When the bird builds her nest – her safe, feathered nook – she places trust – all of her trust; in the fine, repeated movements of her own body. In that feathered body that holds the knowledge of how to build a safe space, deep, deep down – in beside her bones. We know how to do this; we know how to begin to build, again. We know it will be hard, we know it will be harrowing, we know there are some things that we will be broken by – but we know that we can do this. We know we may need to start again – twig by twig, our warm bodies turning over and over, as if in borrowed time – but we know how to build a nest. We know how to sculpt a future that is safe for us all. We give, and we give, and we give. We build, and we build, and we build. We make small moves, repeated gestures – so small as to be almost invisible. We turn, we turn, we turn – through however many seasons it takes – until the light shines down; on the thing that we have built from broken things. Until the light shines down on the future that we have built, as the bird builds her nest; through the act of gentle, mindful, caring giving. We rise, and we rise, and we rise. ‘There has to be one who rises first.’ WE RISE

Dunt: a poem for a dried up river Alice Oswald

Very small and damaged and quite dry, a Roman water nymph made of bone tries to summon a river out of limestone very eroded faded her left arm missing and both legs from the knee down a Roman water nymph made of bone tries to summon a river out of limestone exhausted utterly worn down a Roman water nymph made of bone being the last known speaker of her language she tries to summon a river out of limestone little distant sound of dry grass try again a Roman water nymph made of bone very endangered now in a largely unintelligible monotone she tries to summon a river out of limestone little distant sound as of dry grass try again exquisite bone figurine with upturned urn in her passionate self-esteem she smiles looking sideways she seemingly has no voice but a throat-clearing rustle as of dry grass try again she tries leaning pouring pure outwardness out of a grey urn little slithering sounds as of a rabbit man in full night-gear, who lies so low in the rickety willowherb that a fox trots out of the woods 15

and over his back and away try again she tries leaning pouring pure outwardness out of a grey urn little lapping sounds yes as of dry grass secretly drinking try again little lapping sounds yes as of dry grass secretly drinking try again Roman bone figurine year after year in a sealed glass case having lost the hearing of her surroundings she struggles to summon a river out of limestone little shuffling sound as of approaching slippers year after year in a sealed glass case a Roman water nymph made of bone she struggles to summon a river out of limestone little shuffling sound as of a nearly dried-up woman not really moving through the fields having had the gleam taken out of her to the point where she resembles twilight try again little shuffling clicking she opens the door of the church little distant sounds of shut-away singing try again little whispering fidgeting of a shut-away congregation wondering who to pray to little patter of eyes closing try again very small and damaged and quite dry a Roman water nymph made of bone she pleads she pleads a river out of limestone

little hobbling tripping of a nearly dried-up river not really moving through the fields, having had the gleam taken out of it to the point where it resembles twilight. little grumbling shivering last-ditch attempt at a river more nettles than water try again very speechless very broken old woman her left arm missing and both legs from the knee down she tries to summon a river out of limestone little stoved-in sucked thin low-burning glint of stones rough-sleeping and trembling and clinging to its rights victim of Swindon puddle midden slum of over-greened foot-churn and pats whose crayfish are cheap tool-kits made of the mud stirred up when a stone's lifted it's a pitiable likeness of clear running struggling to keep up with what's already gone the boat the wheel the sluice gate the two otters larricking along go on and they say oh they say in the days of better rainfall it would flood through five valleys there'd be cows and milking stools washed over the garden walls and when it froze you could skate for five miles yes go on little loose end shorthand unrepresented beautiful disused route to the sea fish path with nearly no fish in

Ash Tree Chris Poundwhite In so few strides I circumambulate the tree, its centuries centred in rings of heartwood, sapwood – the circularity of years, charted seasons, bud & leaf-fall, bloom & icicle Myth in its fibres, wood made word; the fissured bark of Yggdrasil, world-tree, tree of Ask – the first man, tree of manna, foe feller, child healer, known by eye & fingertip Here, see the fine and delicate strata of its leaves, how they gift sun’s light one to another, on and on down through themselves, filter & diffuse it, release of form & structure, release as gesture * Chalara, the trees’ killer, gets to work in summer: spore to leaf, hypha to stoma, appressorium splits the epidermis, fungus threads the pith, xylem & phloem In months leaves wither, stems drop, branches purple, suffer lesions. Crown slides low, turns winter-brittle off season. Disease strips whole hills of trees, makes place memory I cannot know the tragedy of moths & lichens, their soft dusty bodies, their searching mouths, their ecosystem syphoned out of other, larger, ecosystems, last generations of their species. I only know how names on maps – Askrigg, Askham, Ashford – will slip their meaning, trip the tongue, the way word follows world, & how forest light will alter

I Want To Be a Tree Sumana Roy I want to be a tree. I know that this desire lives outside the curriculum. Irrationality is man’s favourite home – One man’s love is another’s superstition. I am the tree that wears passion’s baggy clothes. My hair soaks fear, my leaves the planet’s poison air. There is memory, always half-eaten, and there’s sleep, inevitably rural. There’s also sunlight, always a neighbour. It’s summer. And so the road’s deathless fever. I want to be a tree, as naturally branched as the body’s posture in sleep. To woo birds – they avoid men and motion to sit on trees.

I’m leaning against a statue of sunlight. The wind affects us unequally. I wonder why tree branches do not behave like curtains in the wind. Or why we fail to hear creepers knocking at the door.

I want to be a tree. The wind escaped being written. The fire’s autograph, the shrivelled sunlight on trees. Seasons arrive like prompters in a play. The trees perform without the need to pluck claps. I am an extra filling out the frame. Change, cycles, the spiky heads of moss,

the menstrual stillness and the piracy of affection. I want to be a tree. Air a doll between my leaves, prayer as inconsequential as mimicry. Only blood needs religion. And so there is none among plants. Only love, as accommodative as a paragraph. Love needn’t be reciprocal – How else can we love the dead? The earth loses ownership of dead trees. I imagine my funeral sometimes. You, for whom the guitar is an integer of sadness, you who thought I was invincible like crushed paper, saying, “My world has lost its chlorophyll”.

Hermitage Joseph Fasano It’s true there were times when it was too much and I slipped off in the first light or its last hour and drove up through the crooked way of the valley and swam out to those ruins on an island. Blackbirds were the only music in the spruces, and the stars, as they faded out, offered themselves to me like glasses of water ringing by the empty linens of the dead. When Delilah watched the dark hair of her lover tumble, she did not shatter. When Abraham relented, he did not relent. Still, I would tell you of the humbling and the waking. I would tell you of the wild hours of surrender, when the river stripped the cove’s stones from the margin and the blackbirds built their strict songs in the high pines, when the great nests swayed the lattice of the branches, the moon’s brute music touching them with fire. And you, there, stranger in the sway of it, what would you have done there, in the ruins, when they rose from you, when the burning wings ascended, when the old ghosts shook the music from your branches and the great lie of your one sweet life was lifted?

from Swims Elizabeth Jane Burnett Preface oâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; Swimming is continuous, only the rivers are intermittent. The river is something that happens, like exercise or illness, to the body on any given day I am rivering. Not that ooooooo the river is like the body or oooooooooooo the river is the body but ooooooooooo both have gone and what is left is something else. To not end where you thought you did, not with skin but water not with arms but meadow of watercress, dropwort, floating pennywort, against all odds to be buoyant. To feel there is an upward force greater than the weight of the heart the knuckles the head to feel as in to feel it physically push up the ribs which are bones now everything remembering what it is becoming is remembering sinking in the silt is the sand of the shell of the bone singing in the reeds in the rushes hordes of heartbeats not my own: mollusc onto stone, milfoil onto moss, mayfly onto trout, metal onto clay, acid onto wire, electrified chicken wire to keep the salmon in the summer weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll make a day of it, fill the car up, make a day of it, fill the river, make like mayflies in the summer, swim in traffic, swim in the car in the river in the summer in the city in the chicken in the acid in the salmon in the rain

in the silt in the sulphur in the algae in the day we’ll come and part as friends in the day in the river in the moss in the rushes we’ll come and part in the river in the heather in the rushes in the rain we’ll stay and the day and the day and the days dart over and summer is over us salmon leap over us all come apart in the end of the day and the river.

III The Ouse The site of Virginia Woolf’s drowning. Poem performed at increasing speed. “The simplest method of determining the velocity of a current involves an observer, a floating object or drifter, and a timing device.” – U.S Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration One by one the horses come. Breath’s soft shuffle through water foams open and out purrs a language I am learning through the body I am learning through the fact of my being here haunch in water standing head in hedge standing with everything I’ve got. The simplest method of determining the velocity of a current involves a horse, a floating object or drifter, and a timing device. One by one the horses come purring me open I stir and shake shivers jolt in parts of the body yet / to be discovered I ache in the hedge of the water is forcing me open the horses are dark as the earth darker than earth

deeper their flanks rise from the pit of the word the gut of the word the ditch the dust the ear the ĂŠar the eard the native soil or land deeper than that is the horse that purrs me open in water in open in open water the simplest method of determining the velocity of a word involves a horse, a girl, and a timing device. One by one the horses come stirring me open into water into open water I bend and purr from rib to hip is a rich loaming I flank and fall and purr in the water I am learning that the simplest method of determining the velocity of a word involves a horse, a girl, and a poem.

The Poet and the Glamour Girl Go on a Hike Kim Hyesoon Tonight the poet and the glamour girl decide to go on a hike. The first part of the trail is flat. The poet is used to easy hikes, but the trail gets rockier as she climbs up. She slips, slides. Behind the poet, the glamour girl snorts, Ha you can’t even handle such a short climb. The poet gets more out of breath as she climbs up higher. The breathing of the two is wildly out of sync. The poet nags for a rest. The glamour girl is getting hot, so she briskly takes off the navy blue sky. Then she asks, Are you cold? Are you cold? and bites the poet’s frozen ears. This mountain must have no compassion, compassion, says the poet wanting to put down her heart, which is about to burst, but the trail keeps getting steeper, and the glamour girl who is more experienced urges on the poet who is out of breath, Don’t put down your heart yet! If we go back down now it’s worse than not having come up at all. The two stop arguing and watch the wrinkled ridge run up gasping – it must have burst open a spring. The two make nice and drink the spring water. They drink some and spill some. The water spreads. It freezes under their feet till the ground becomes slippery. Now the poet is totally exhausted, Getting to the summit is too much, a mountain can’t be swallowed in a single gulp, and the rhythm of my breathing and walking is out of sync, so this can’t become a poem. But the glamour girl who has been memorizing all the shapes of the valleys says, Why give up now when the view is so fantastic? Then she unties the sun’s belt unrolling it. The sunset gets released at the corner of the sky and the three temples with ThreeThousandBuddhaEnshrinementCommemorationAllNightThreeThousandBowsDevotion alPrayer written on them suddenly float up inside the poet’s panting. Tinkle tinkle – the sound of the landscape, as the poet embraces the glamour girl and cries her eyes out. We have reached the lit temples, the poet is moved, moved. Regardless, the glamour girl closes her eyes and lets her hands relax and says, There’s still the ThreeThousandBows to do, and bites into the poet’s neck.

Neither Above nor Below Claire Miye Stanford

Jakarta Is Sinking So Fast, It Could End Up Underwater —New York Times headline, 12/21/17

A flash of silver-green in the water. That is all Hasan sees, but it is enough. He runs after, alongside, his small legs propelling him across the planks and platforms that crisscross the city. The wood once scratched underfoot, but it has gone smooth with time and wear, just as the soles of Hasan’s feet have grown thick and hearty, able to withstand all but the sharpest of splinters. He hasn’t seen a turtle for days. He promised Ricardo he would get one for him. He said it braggingly, hands on hips, in the way of eight-year-olds who still believe they are unstoppable, that the world holds no match for them. Now, days later, he is beginning to feel twinges of chagrin, a new emotion. But then, there it is: the flash of silver-green. Redemption. Hasan hears his feet thunk-thunk on the wooden platforms. The planks whisper softly below his pounding weight. He has no fear that they will break. They will hold; they have always held. He has run this way and that across the city since he was able to walk. He hears the swish of the turtle, gliding through the water alongside, the lap of the water’s edge against the

planks. The waterways cut through the city like a maze for which Hasan knows every turn and curve and dead end. The turtle, too, knows its way. The turtle, too, has been here before. The turtle watched the ingress of water into the city, but unlike the humans, it watched without fear, without alarm. It watched, instead, with patience. It waited to retake the land the humans had taken from it. The turtle makes a sharp right. From where Hasan stands, the turtle’s logic is unclear, but no matter. Hasan has only to follow, to trust that the turtle knows where it is going and why. Hasan jumps from board to board, keeping the turtle always in sight. He runs past the fishermen, past the dry goods shop, past the seamstresses, heads bent over their work. Past the school where he spends six hours a day learning to read and write, learning his arithmetic, so that one day he can go to University like Ricardo. Ricardo is a doctor, Hasan knows, but not the kind of doctor who can fix a body. He’s a doctor of turtles is what Hasan thinks, a doctor of the sea. Ricardo came to study their city. That’s what he told Hasan. That their city was the only place in the world that lived so close to the water, the only city in the world that had found a way to coexist with the rising tides. Hasan nods his head when Ricardo tells him this, but it does not totally make sense to Hasan. Of course they live close to the water. Where else would they live? Hasan’s grandparents tell him the city was not always like this, but he has known nothing but. To him, it is beautiful, a never-ending playground of mangroves and sea hibiscus, longtailed monkeys and heron. His grandparents tell him the city sank, not just because of the rising waters of the sea but because of human greed, human corruption, humans digging under the surface of the city, lowering it inch by inch. That, even, was before their time. Eighty years earlier, an era unknown. Many fled to higher ground, but those who stayed welcomed the water. It was the corrupt ones who fled, that’s what Hasan’s grandparents say. Those who remained adapted, rebuilt. They raised their houses on stilts; they grew accustomed to moving about the city on makeshift rafts. They built the platforms that Hasan runs across now. The government offered to resettle them, to move them to solid ground. But why should they move? Hasan’s family has lived in the city for centuries. His ancestors walked its roadways back when it was known only as the port of Sunda Kelapa, a valuable stop on European trade routes. His ancestors fought for Sunan Gunungjati, driving out the first colonizers. Sunan Gunungjati, who named the city Jayakarta. Victorious City. These are the lessons Hasan learns in school. Impossible to understand the present, his teacher says, without understanding the past. The turtle has reached a dead end. But it does not fret. It glides to a stop and floats, contemplating its next move. It is patient. It feels the warmth of the sun above, the cool water below. It has time. Hasan pulls the equipment Ricardo gave him from the pouch that hangs across his back. He lies on his stomach and reaches his hands into the water. Slowly, slowly. He inches his hands toward the turtle’s body until he holds its ancient mass between his fingers. He lifts it out of the water and into the humid air, gentle, gentle. It flaps its flippers, but it does not fight. He

holds the turtle by the body, careful, careful, just like Ricardo showed him. He takes its flipper between his thumb and index finger. It trembles in his hand. Hasan runs the disinfectant swab over the flipper and clips on the metal tag, quick, quick, the flipper tough like leather. He eases the turtle back into the water and feels the splash of drops on his face. He wonders if he will ever see this turtle again. The tags will help him know. Hasan watches it swim away, untroubled by his brief intervention, the feel of human hands already forgotten. Hasan, too, will one day be a doctor of the sea. The turtles, Ricardo says, are coming back. Jayakarta. Victorious.

A Stone Statue in The Future Benjamin Myers

Across the water I saw the familiar shape of the warden, Old Ted, making his way up from the lower ponds where the serious coarse fishermen spent their days in silence tending to their many rods, each of which was nearly as long as the narrow strips of water were wide. Old Ted was making slow progress. He was walking so slowly that from this distance his movement was barely perceptible. Yet he must have been moving, for when I glanced away, then back again, he had advanced. He certainly was old. Older than the hills, if there were any. Maybe there used to be hills surrounding these ponds, but perhaps Old Ted had outlived them. Perhaps the hills had crumbled to dust and dirt, levelled by industrialisation and encroaching urbanisation, but yet Ted remained, ably assisting generation after generation of novice anglers visiting on a day ticket. Maybe one day they will make a statue of Old Ted and stand it by the pond, where birds will rest on his shoulders and fish will leap out of the water to get a glimpse of his familiar form. They will not be able to tell whether Ted is stationary or moving so slowly it merely appears that way. And now old ecological possibilities increasingly resemble, at best, likelihoods or, at the very worst, certainties. The world will keep turning on its axis and the landscape will slowly change, as it always does. Temperatures will increase and the surface of the earth will dry and crack and eventually the ponds will be without water. Then they will be filled in or become overgrown, the area entirely neglected.

The surrounding fields will fall fallow too, and nature will reclaim them, covering all with creeping vines and thick tangles of weed that will increase in density with each passing summer, though by then the four seasons may merge into one long arid spell marked only by the sure passage of the raging sun. Perhaps this will not be such a bad thing after all. Perhaps the parasites will take over entirely, yet still amongst them will stand the statue of Ted, mottled by acidic rain and turned green with a plush coat of moss, the rising tide of the weeds swallowing him up and pulling him under. Years will pass, until Old Ted’s green stone head will be barely visible above the thicket and you will see it only if you know where to look, because in the future where the pond and the fields are now will become a place where no-one goes because the attachment to the natural world will no longer be as strong. In the future every action will require a purpose, and no-one will have the purpose to go and find a long-lost statue of a fishing warden from the earlier years of that strange and haunted time known as the 21st century.  Further centuries may utter by like the pages of an ancient Rolodex and Old Ted will still be standing. But he will begin to slowly tilt. He will be below what is now ground level too, for the thicket will have grown and died and decomposed, and the mulch bed will have risen like a pile of rancid mattresses and new weeds will grow in it, but he will, in a manner of speaking, be still standing. The surface of the planet will keep growing and dying in this manner, growing and dying through ten thousand more sunsets, the bodies of its depleted inhabitants sunk in soil or turned to ephemeral dust in the polluted ether, and eventually the statue of Ted will disappear beneath all that dead matter. Yes. One day the statue will simply topple sideways and sink into the noxious methane bog with a noise like a plunger over a plughole, or a childhood wellington being pulled from a perilous moorland quag, though of course in the future people will have a different set of reference points because by then everything will look, smell, taste, feel and sound different. The way in which lives are lived will be so far beyond current recognition as to be unimaginable, and our motivations will have altered accordingly. And finally the statue will disappear and the compost of time will cover it like funeral soil over a coffin lowered into the cold ground of a place once called England. A place like this.  But even then – even then – the statue of Ted will remain intact, though unseen. What once in times gone were called years, decades and centuries will pass, though time will be marked by a different scale, and spoken of with an entirely new vocabulary that would not sit right on the tongues of today. One day, someone or something will stumble upon it. Unearth it. Maybe they’ll find him in the cellar of a building they built on top of the statue. Maybe they’ll see his head poking back through the soil once more. Old Ted. They’ll see the stone toecap of one of his boots. It may be a centillion years in the future, but one day Ted will be found. And when that day comes the people will scrape the mud clear and stand around scratching their heads while forming wild hypotheses. A future version of what we today call experts and academics will be called in to offer conflicting opinions. Some will declare the statue to be the effigy of a primitive god of some sort. Others will view the statue upside down and decide that that was how man used to live, before he became enlightened and stopped walking on his hands. Still others will think the statue of Old Ted is merely the nose of a far greater statue, depicting a fat deity from a

time when gender was marked as male and female and things had not yet merged into the more harmonious and beautiful genderless, one-race humans. Some of the experts will discuss their theories at length, and the stone statue will form the centrepiece of a go-to destination where the ponds lie today. Maybe it will take the discovery of this story to unlock the secrets of the statue’s origins. More likely it won’t. But if that day comes, the ponds might be dug in again. e rains will fall, the fish will follow and the cycle will begin anew. People young and old will gather there, as they did on that glorious spring afternoon. And Old Ted will be re-erected to his position of former glory once more. * I was thinking about all this when I looked up and saw that Old Ted wasn’t a statue, but a human who had walked around the pond and was approaching me. A few minutes must have passed while I was daydreaming. Soon he was by my side. ‘Now then,’ he said, squinting out across the pond, in a position and pose not much different from how I had envisaged his imaginary future statue. ‘Yes,’ I replied. We stood like this for a while, me clutching the fly rod and Old Ted looking out into the middle distance and, beyond it, an incomprehensible future. Many silent minutes passed. Then Old Ted spoke. ‘Any luck?’  ‘No. No luck.’  Another full minute passed. Old Ted looked up at the sky. Old Ted looked at the pond. Then back to the sky. Out of politeness I did the same. Finally, he spoke again.  ‘You should try a bloodworm.’ The way he said it, with depth and great import, seemed to give his advice a greater resonance, as if had been boomed down from above by a watching God. You should try a bloodworm. He reached into his coat and rummaged around in the tweed folds for what seemed like a long time, making me wonder what other items of interest might be held in there. All I had was an apple and some fluff. Eventually he pulled out a box and squatted down in the grass beside the pond. As he did his knees cracked. They sounded like gunfire. Everything he did – his movements, his speech – was measured and considered. ‘Now then,’ he said again. He opened the box to reveal an array of fly hooks. There were dozens of them in there, of many different colours. Each was hand-made so that when they were wet they would replicate a particular type of insect or hatching larva. He had lures for every conceivable situation and season. They were beautifully crafted in amazing colours and when they caught the sunlight, as they did now, they appeared to be alive too. Some were made from gold thread, but with a silver silk thread interwoven to make them shimmer in the water. Some were a violent red, others a combination of yellow and black. There were purples and oranges and greens too. Those lures spanned the spectrum of colours. A few looked like comical creatures, the way

that tiny feathers stuck out from them at odd angles to replicate tails or wings, or in the tiny little sewn-on beads that gave the impression of cartoon eyes. I didn’t know what insects each of them was meant to be a doppelganger of, but I knew they were convincing. Sitting there in neat rows in Old Ted’s y box, they almost looked too good to waste by tying on to a line and casting out across a pond. They looked like works of art that should be displayed on individual plinths in a gallery, perhaps under titles such as Man’s Cruelty or Come Fly With Me. Old Ted ran his finger across them before carefully pulling out a thin red lure made from several blood-red threads tied together. ‘Reel it in. We’ll give this a go.’ A minute later Old Ted had deftly cut o the old lure and tied on the bloodworm lure. ‘Try that for size,’ he said, standing up, his knees cracking like gun re once again. ‘And if you get a bite, keep your rod up.’ ‘Yes.’  ‘Rod up.’  ‘Rod up,’ I repeated.  I dipped the lure in the water and saw the simple fine red threads transform into a wriggling, squirming bloodworm. Old Ted slowly turned to walk away. I cast the line. ‘Keep your rod up,’ he said again, as if I could forget. * Old Ted was no more than ten steps away when my line went tight with the unfamiliar, yet unmistakable, jerk of a fish. The energy surge was unmistakable: life was happening out there. A warm sense of calm washed over me. I immediately and instinctively knew that in a world of chaos and chance, one thing was certain: this fish was mine. It was already mine before it had even taken the bloodworm, mine before I cast over, mine before I began daydreaming about future statues, mine before I arrived at the pond, mine before the fish was born. Mine before even I was born. That fish was mine when dinosaurs roamed the earth.  It was mine even before fish existed.  That fish was mine when earth was just a moiling ball of hot magma charging through an indifferent universe.  It was pre-destined.  Ten seconds with the bloodworm and I already had a bite. Unbelievable.  Old Ted shouted something, turning around and heading back towards me.  ‘What?’ I said. I couldn’t hear him over the thrash of the water.  ‘Up – keep your rod up.’ I quickly raised the tip of my rod that I had forgotten to lift up, away from the water. The movement pulled the fish towards the surface and I got my first ash of white and silver as it writhed and snapped in the water. It was no good; try as it might, it could not escape. Every event that happened throughout time had led to this moment: the fish was mine. ‘That’s it, lad’ said Old Ted, by my side now.

‘Nice and easy. OK – now start winding it in. Steady now. Nice and steady.’ I slowly turned the handle of the reel as the line tightened with the weight of it. The fish was tugging hard, the rod bending dramatically. But this was just for show, a final flash of strength before submission. The fish, as I say, was mine. I lifted the rod and the fish came clean out of the water and straight into the landing net that Old Ted had quickly assembled, dipped and held out for me. We placed it on the grass and I got a good look at it, my first catch as an adult. The fish I was born to catch. ‘Fetch me your priest,’ said Old Ted.  ‘What?’ ‘Do you have a priest?  ‘No,’ I said, confused.  ‘A priest is what you use for dispatching the fish.’ ‘Oh, right.’ ‘Good job I have one.’  Old Ted reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a short stout cudgel that looked as if it was made from bone.  ‘They call it a priest because it offers the last rites to the fish,’ he explained. ‘It makes their passage swift and painless.’ I just nodded. I was in no state of mind for irony. And with that he gave two swift taps to the back of the fish’s head. It stopped moving. I wondered whether I should say a prayer or a few words. He passed the fish to me. ‘Congratulations. Your first rainbow trout. I’d say it’s a two-pounder.’ ‘Thanks Ted. Thanks a lot.’ He wiped his hands on the grass then slowly stood up, his knees creaking this time like the trunks of old oak trees in high autumn winds. ‘My work here,’ he wheezed, ‘is done.’ And with that he departed. Very slowly. I cradled the fish in the crook of my arm as if it were a new-born baby. I even supported its head. A two-pounder – wow. What was only a minute earlier a powerful, thrashing entity zig-zagging its way to the depths of this pond was now an inanimate object, as lifeless as a baguette or a ukulele, as perfectly formed and flawless as a vase from the Ming dynasty. Yet as watery blood stained my palms, what should have felt victorious suddenly seemed so senseless and unnecessary. I stared into the eternal deep nothingness of its dark eyes and I saw a thousand black flowers opening. A robbery had taken place. The theft of life. I would never fish again.

Anke Butawitsch Germany Madeira Portugal The Lone Tree Award 2019

Armand Sarangue France North Caineville Mesa, Capitol Reef National Park, Utah, USA

Ignacio Palacios Australia LenĂ§Ăłis Maranhenses, Brazil

Rowena English Australia Lofoten Islands, Norway

David Frutos Egea Spain â&#x20AC;&#x153;The fallen idol IIIâ&#x20AC;? Nature Photographer of the year 2019 (Plants and Fungi Winner)

Justin Hofman USA Canadian Arctic “A Polar Bear’s Struggle” Wildlife Photographer of the Year

James Bell England Buttermere, Lake District, England Shortlisted for Take a View â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Landscape Photographer of the year 2011 competition

Edited by Matthew Wigelsworth