We have an opportunity to listen 

Maggie Mackay reviews High Nowhere by Jean Atkin (Indigo Dreams, 2023)

High Nowhere opens with a quote from the American essayist and poet Wendell Berry: “There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.” This desecration of our Earth is a pressing subject for poets such as Pascal Petit, Joy Hargo, Rachael Boast and Kathleen Jamie. They explore how human behaviour is leading to the extinction of species, rising ocean levels, and the existential threat of planetary breakdown. In High Nowhere, Jean Atkin aims to follow in their footsteps, placing her particular focus on weather, place, and non-human life. Hers are the sort of poems that Roger Robinson calls “empathy machines”. ^[1]In an interview in the Guardian in 2020, Robinson said “Poets can touch hearts and minds; they can translate trauma into something people can face. Sometimes there’s a cost for the poet to … Continue reading She also quotes William Blake, which imparts an element of visionary zeal.

Atkin creates imaginary landscapes, in which she evokes both the tragedy of our individual experiences of climate change and, in equal measure, our joy at being alive. A journey to Iceland during the Covid era forms the central part of the collection, and much emphasis is placed on the magnificence and power of icebergs, fjords and volcanoes, which here represent a combination of beauty and danger, as well as a symbol for how planet Earth has become destabilised. The poet’s own black and white photographs add a further dimension to the storytelling.

Atkin creates imaginary landscapes in which she evokes both the tragedy of our individual experiences of climate change and, in equal measure, our joy at being alive

The collection is divided into six sections. The opening section, ‘Brink’, focuses on the extinction of species. In the first poem, ‘wood’, “The tatty wood lets out // its rusted ghost of parish tip, ramshackles / down a bank.” It’s a hint of trouble to come. The following eight poems commemorate the loss of the dodo, the passenger pigeon and the Tasmanian Tiger, among others. Atkin celebrates birdlife even as their kind slips away, robbing us of their enrichment to the biodiversity many of the post-war generation took for granted. She laments these lost lives eloquently. ‘Listen’ tells of the stillness which came over the oceans during the first wave of Covid-19, when the seismic mapping ships ceased operation:

and a marine acoustician said
we have an opportunity to listen 

It’s an effective eulogy for the enormous number of fish and marine mammals damaged and killed by the constant cacophony of industrial air guns searching for oil under the sea bed.

The second section, ‘Spread’, is a set of four poems covering the Covid lockdowns – a lonely experience for Atkin. In ‘clocks’ she says, “Rain, / while I’m outside, is company.” The piece ‘lockdown heron’ describes the momentous beauty of the creature in flight, which somehow underscores the solitude of the narrator, who watches it 

[…] bank over
the neighbour’s ridgepole
and side-slip drop to draw
with grey-sky-elbowed wings
a ragged loop above our pond

My own childhood was lived largely out of doors. Perhaps that’s why I think back to the pandemic years with a degree of gratitude. Human activity slowed down, air travel more or less stopped, traffic vanished. Mass entertainment closed down. Many of us rediscovered the joys (even the necessity) of silence.

Atkin ends her second section by comparing humans to the SARS-CoV-2 virus in ‘Earth’s viral load’. We infest the earth like any other parasite, and “each one wants only to live”.

The third section, ‘Source’, is a sequence of four poems on the subject of water and starts with a photo of an old Esso fuel pump abandoned at the foot of a cliff. These four pieces read as folk ballads or laments, particularly ‘A Wish on the Glynch’ with its repetitions of “wish for water”: 

Wish for water
say Clenchers mill and Pepper mill
wish for water, say Berry, Blackford, Staunton mills,
all in a row. Gone are the little mills, like corn
bent under gales, laid low. 

The poems are elegies for the old watermills (such as Dorlcote Mill in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss) and the communities they served. A long poem, ‘Death of an oil rig’, tells the story of redundant oil rig ‘Winner’, “condemned at thirty‐three and bound / for scrap”, towed out of Scottish waters to be broken up in Turkey because “Winner is worth zero dollars per ton / in Europe but big bucks in the east.” It’s a powerful, emotive poem, and if you need an example of the horrors of industrial obsolescence, here it is.

It’s a powerful, emotive poem, and if you need an example of the horrors of industrial obsolescence, here it is.

At the heart of the fourth section, ‘High Nowhere’, Atkin focuses on a trip to Iceland, describing the rugged and unforgiving landscape in all weathers. Her vocabulary is visceral, guttural, overflowing with regret. There’s a sense that Cassandra is in the room. ‘Dyrhólaey’ explores the selkie fable – where a fisherman steals a Selkie’s skin (so she will have to stay human) and marries her, but one day forgets to guard the key to the chest where he has hidden the skin, with the result that “at last she hears her smooth and dappled / sealskin sing a tide inside the kist”. This is directly followed by ‘Evacuation photographs at Heimaey, 1973’, a poem about photographer Kristjan H Kristjansson, who recorded the evacuation after a volcanic eruption. Both texts deal with loss, trauma, a violent wrenching.

In the fifth section, ‘Fable’, Atken celebrates the glory of “dusty moths” and daddy-long-legs, and mourns their absence:

Now we leave the windows flung wide
in the heated evenings. We leave the lamps lit.
The streets glow. The gardens glow.
And nothing, nothing happens. 

But all is not lost. In ‘front’, she says, “the river spins me a kingfisher, / a sudden pulsing curve of peacocked flight.”

The final section, ‘Path’, looks to the future. A spider is born, and lays her own eggs, leaving “a thread through winter” for us to follow. The narrator has a conversation with her cat. And in ‘Dougie aged eight at Gutcher’s Isle’, a small boy discovers treasures under his feet – “wet black snailshell, wave of glass”. The poem closes:

Above us, thrift heads thatch the granite,
swayed with bees they overlean the sides.
You point to blue sky splashed in white –
a rising sail of butterflies. 

It’s a radiant place to end.

Maggie Mackay‘s poetry has been published in many publications and anthologies. Her pamphlet The Heart of the Run was published by Picaroon Poetry in 2018 and her collection A West Coast Psalter by Kelsay Books in 2021. The Poetry Archive WordView 2020 awarded her poem ‘How to Distil a Guid Scotch Malt’ a place in the permanent collection. Her second collection, The Babel of Human Travel, was published in December 2022 by Impspired Press. She enjoys a whisky, a good jazz band, and daydreaming with her gorgeous rescue greyhound.