As research for my PhD in Creative Writing in Lancaster’s Department of English and Creative Writing, (and forthcoming book) Abundance: Nature in Recovery, in 2019 I was fortunate to accompany writer and naturalist extraordinaire Mark Cocker on a visit to the Prespa Lakes in Northern Greece. The levels of abundance that still exist in this remote landscape are utterly disproportionate to anything that now exists in the UK. The UK, we know,[i] is the most nature-depleted country in all of Europe. But in Prespa, this little-visited mountainous region holds internationally important breeding colonies of white and Dalmatian pelicans – the first time I’d seen these birds in the wild - along with nightingales and golden orioles – species that are clinging on in the last vestiges of habitat in the south of England. But had we chosen to look at and think about our landscapes differently, this would not be the case; nightingales would remain.
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Poems for the Anthropocene
Pond Frogs, Lake Prespa
Out in the darkness a female frog crams
her shambolic self into the meeting place
of ground and wall. She is a car wreck of a frog,
legs akimbo like a newborn’s unfixed limbs,
her skin awash with dots and dashes,
the twin gun covers of her eyes accommodating
lightning, rain and puddles.
The anti-song of pond frogs is a night-time
flood that travels over the scrub of the island.
Throngs of froggy neurons fire themselves
along rainwater highways among stone houses
and old buildings too busy crumpling
under the great responsibilities
of age and weather.
The frogs are Steve Reich on a three-note bender.
An outbreak, a contamination even, of sex;
if only it were funny…
amphibian desperados with one thing –
and I mean one thing only – on their minds.
Mind, I would kiss one; I would.
I would fasten my lips to his if only
it would lead to blessed sleep.
Meanwhile, above my froggy echo-chamber,
in pantile hovels restless starling mothers
gather their pterodactyl broods
underneath wings of stars.
And the rain falls.
There is no rest for any of us, only this;
the voluptuous syntax of rain, dripping from gutters,
drenching the reed-beds on the lake,
racing herculean races along the trampled pathways
of the goats and the sheep and the shepherd
and his dark-eyed slow wife. Only the rain,
smoothing the infinite overtures of frogs,
oiling the thunderstruck journeys
of these hapless refugees.
These poems were first published by Wayleave Press in 2020 in my pamphlet titled Self Portrait as Ornithologist.