Hilary Menos reviews The Luck by Jane Routh (Smith|Doorstop, 2024)
Topping and tailing blackcurrants at the back window
– the window wide and the evening scent of lilies.
Some small creature struggling along the stones
in the heat, rolls over – a huge beetle? Binoculars:
the drunken creature ducks under the doorstep,
rushes out, rolls again – it’s a bee,
a queen hypnorum, bright orange thorax doubled
by the matching small male on her back she’s
trying everything to throw off.
A dart of air into the climbing hydrangea,
in and out of last year’s nest at the speed of invisibility
the moment they return from Africa, and off
just as secretly, must be soon now, in a moonlight flit –
the acrobatics of flycatching! – while the white bowl
fills slowly, so slowly with clean fruit,
a ladybird wandering around in the pile
of stalks and leaves and rejects, and sometimes
the beating of small wings and still the scent of lilies
as if this is how it always is, as if hoverflies
were not having to take over from honey bees,
as if platoons of processionary oak moth
were not already foraging beyond their control zone,
as if plastics were not… as if the week’s newspaper cuttings
waiting on the table (and that bee) were not telling how
it is already otherwise.
In four hard-hitting poems at the beginning of her new book, Jane Routh links the Covid lockdowns in 2020 to the Foot & Mouth outbreak of 2001 and the H5N1 Bird Flu outbreak in 2007 (which Wikipedia, enjoyably, calls the ‘Bernard Matthews’ outbreak, because the first cases were discovered in a Bernard Matthews turkey farm in Suffolk). I was living in Devon when Foot & Mouth broke out, and had just sold my nine South Devon cows with calves at foot, but in the following months many neighbouring farmers lost cattle and some lost whole herds, including bloodlines that they had bred for decades. Between February and September 2001, more than six million animals were slaughtered in the UK, around 4.2 million for disease control purposes and 2.3 million for welfare reasons. It was a difficult time for all in and around the farming community, and tragic for some, and Routh’s mention of “listening at 3am for tyres / through straw and disinfectant” in ‘FMDV Type O pan Asia’ brings it all back for me. As she says, “Nevermind / mere business gone: it was your life / your home, your family’s history.”
The Bird Flu outbreak in 2007 must have held particular, personal resonance for Routh, because at the time she kept (and still keeps) a flock of geese. Again, the experience was shocking, and this comes across vividly in ‘H5N1’: “clamp-down immediate, no movement, / no mixing with the wild and / a cull at any sign of illness”. That word, cull, leaps from the page, and she’s aware of this: “the word / at one remove from kill”. Many poultry keepers didn’t emerge with their flocks intact, luckily the poet did: “The flock survived, two (now ancient) / ganders with us still.”
And so to the Covid-19 pandemic. As Routh says, we had been here before, dealing with masks and gloves, “blindly warding off unknowables / and worrying at 3am about deaths.” But while Foot & Mouth and Bird Flu took the lives of cattle and birds, in the main, Covid-19 threatened human life. “This is now,” she says, in ‘SARS-CoV-2’. “This fear is new / and for ourselves”.
By drawing these events together, Routh allows for a broader perspective than many of the other poetry collections which address just the Covid-19 pandemic
By drawing these events together, Routh allows for a broader perspective than other poetry collections which deal with simply the Covid-19 pandemic. The implications of this perspective are far reaching. While humans may not have actually created these viruses, human neglect or human agency has been identified as an issue in each of the ensuing crises. And we are, certainly, responsible for climate change and all its various manifestations. The question implicit in The Luck is, of course, what will the next virus – the next crisis – be?
Routh addresses various aspects of climate change without hectoring. For example, she refers to water stress in ‘Dry’. “Every day, the forecasts’ broken promises; […] suppose we wait for rains / that don’t come this year, that don’t come / next, like so many have done already / before setting out for an elsewhere.” Nature is resilient, strikingly demonstrated in ‘The verge,’ by “the old hedge throwing up six-foot hazels, / blackthorn roots claiming ground for knee-high spikes”, but still, this year only one flycatcher returns. And whatever form another crisis might take, she doesn’t see us doing much to prevent it. In ‘Minus 8°C’ she says:
Plenty of lessons in this ice –
and for us all – though we’ll go on
like Easter Islanders, holding to our faith
in back-to-normal-before-long.
In his 2005 book Collapse, Jared Diamond describes Easter Island as “the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources.” This, the poet implies, is where we’re heading.
Routh looks after an Ancient Semi Natural Woodland, plants new woodlands, and keeps geese. She’s firmly rooted in her landscape, and seems conversant with all aspects of nature that surround her – the trees, of course, both old woods and young plantations, plus the deer that occasionally do damage to them, but also barn owls, harriers, flycatchers, fieldfares, a song thrush, and of course her own flock, plus bees, beetles, stoats. She observes the local flora and fauna keenly, and translates them onto the page with skill and charm. In ‘Hold out your hand,’ a wren is “your warm handful”. Its song “cascades / outwards and up to fall like rain like blessing.” Sometimes her poetry feels spiritual, revelatory. A barn owl’s “great white-and-gold / glide […] cases the fields […] and she’s off / to a low branch of ancient ash, breast gleaming, / a steady beacon among the glitter of droplets / on every twig as the sun comes out.”
Her language is gorgeous, evocative, and precise
By celebrating the living world around her, Routh manages to balance the horror of what is happening to it with joy in its richness and variousness. Her language is gorgeous, evocative, and precise. In ‘The verge,’ she could be describing a perfume, were it not also so tactile, so grabbable, so … wade-able through!
a thigh-high wild raspberry thicket among hardheads
and tufted vetch and great willow herb,
a patch of palest cream honeysuckle the evening topnote
over damp and rank verdure and crushed fern.
She never forgets “how loose a grip we have on a world on the verge / of turning back to purposes of its own instead of ours”, and her ambivalence over the way humans maintain control over the natural world is clear. For Routh, the way forward is to appreciate certain moments, and enshrine them in poetry. In ‘Topping and tailing blackcurrants at the back window’ she watches, appreciates, celebrates and mourns, while “the white bowl / fills slowly, so slowly with clean fruit”. It’s moments like these which count, moments when one can appreciate both the loveliness and the precariousness of nature, and where one feels a true connection to it. In ‘A short cut home’ she implies that we would do well to pursue these connections with the natural world in the way that we once did, to feel part of something larger:
[…] to step into the Little Wood
is to step outside yourself to where time
doesn’t measure itself in ticks and hours
but flows through seasons into centuries
Here, I need to mention Routh’s long poem ‘The February Museum: recent acquisitions’, which was one of our early Friday Poems. It’s a three-page, six-part piece which utilises the conceit of a museum catalogue listing. The sixth ‘exhibit’ is an annotated calendar page for February 2021 (the second UK lockdown was January 2021 – July 2021). The calendar evokes the reality of lockdown for many rural dwellers. “Many empty squares. / Food deliveries on the same day each week. / Two birthdays and six online ‘events’.” The calendar photograph, a view of Luskentyre and the Harris hills in the Outer Hebrides, shows “the shining expanse of wet sand empty / of any sign of what we have done to the world.”
Other poems address Routh’s own life, and her path to it, “the flukes and chaos and choices”. The house she and her partner bought is described in ‘Hearthed’ – no water, no electric, no road, two major cracks in one end. In ‘Beam’ she describes one of the house timbers as “straight and so hard nails bounce off”. This seems like an uncompromising place, but one that has ultimately been profoundly rewarding. Now, none of the past challenges and privations matter, and Routh describes “waking each morning to the same views / in some new manifestation: belonging.”
Sometimes her poetry feels spiritual, revelatory
Interspersed through the collection is a series of ‘The dead never leave’ poems. Memories and ghosts of dead family members, old friends, past farmworkers and locals follow her “everywhere, even into dreams”. “On sleepless nights / they clamber under the covers, board-stiff, / to warm themselves” on her memories. What’s Routh doing here? I think she’s showing us how our relationships with the dead are ongoing, and change as we get older and can better understand what they said when we were too young to grasp their meaning, too “invincible”. She’s also looking at how much we owe them. In ‘The dead never leave III’ she says, “Your old green jumper which still fits – every / stitch of it was slipped round their fingers.” And she is addressing her own ageing and the inevitable conclusion, “as we hurtle towards our own darks” (‘September again’). In ‘Without which’ she scoops a handful of dirt, without which there would be nothing, and ends with :
[…] this handful of warm dark earth that smells
of the past and of this moment and just here
and of which one day I too will be a part
There’s no full stop at the and of this poem, appropriately.
So what is this ‘luck’ of the book title? It must be a reference to the poem ‘Having the luck’ which pokes gentle fun at ‘experts’ and in particular an “expert on small mustelids”, who has never “had the luck” to see a stoat dancing. Routh has seen one, and she describes the animal’s movements beautifully: the stoat is a “chestnut ribbon of speed” and dances with a “leap, hide, back-flip, play-death, and […] a mid-air corkscrew roll”. It’s joyful. I haven’t ever “had the luck” to see a stoat dancing either but now I reckon I have a pretty good idea of what it looks like: “bounce bounce bounce and away”.
Hilary Menos is editor of The Friday Poem.
‘Topping and tailing blackcurrants at the back window’ is from The Luck by Jane Routh (Smith|Doorstop, 2024) — thanks to Jane Routh and Smith|Doorstop for letting us publish it.
