A host of golden words that show landscape in new light

It’s a fact that people who don’t read a lot of poetry think that most poems are about nature and landscape.

“Flowers and trees…” they’ll say, waving their hands airily like a flower or a tree. They’ll look misty-eyed and quote the first line of Wordsworth’s Daffodils.

They’ll imagine that all poets spend their days wandering lonely as a cloud, waiting for inspiration to strike and when the moment’s right they’ll whip their notebook out at the first hint of hoverfly or a shrub.

A lot of poetry is indeed about nature and landscape and it’s true that a lot of it is written in an often fairly simple and sentimental way, that’s just the way it is.

However somewhere bubbling under the surface, is a long line of more adventurous nature poetry; writers like the late North East poets Barry MacSweeney and Richard Caddell who tried to think of more interesting and challenging ways to present the world around them.

Both were key figures in the British Poetry Revival, which reinvigorated the art and paved the way for much of today’s best writing.

A number of the best of the current radical writers of landscape are collected in a superb new anthology, The Ground Aslant, edited by Harriet Tarlo, a poet from Holmfirth who teaches at Sheffield Hallam University.

You might ask what could be radical about landscape poetry? It’s a fair question, since landscape is landscape, surely all the poet or prose writer has to do is describe it?

Well maybe, but in this collection Tarlo shows us new ways of looking, new ways of seeing the familiar open air that, let’s face it, we’re surrounded by in Yorkshire.

Tarlo’s introduction sets the scene: “There does seem to be a growing momentum to landscape writing and this perhaps reflects the growing political and ecological importance of our relationship to our environment.” In other words, this is a peopled landscape, and, as she says, the word is a compound of “land” and “scape”, and it can refer to, as she puts it, “our human ‘scaping’ of the land in art.”

The anthology begins with some poems by Colin Simms, to my mind one of the greatest and most neglected of all Yorkshire’s poets of landscape. Simms has been writing for a long time, and indeed I’ve written about him in the Yorkshire Post before, many years ago.

He’s a naturalist as well as a poet, and his work is full of sharp observation, often of creatures moving in scapes, whether landscapes or skyscapes: he describes meadowlarks singing “morning and evening/only/in heat of the day/in fence-shade” and his snowy owl is “strength/nothing else/detachable/as if snow carded itself”, carding being a word for preparing wool for spinning, an exact description of the owl that shines with linguistic precision.

Harriet Tarlo herself writes spacious work, the words tumbling across the page like leaves falling across a field of vision.

In her poem Outcrops at Haverigg, she captures the idea of wind, of small movements in the landscape in her carefully and beautifully scattered words. I won’t scatter my words across the page but I hope you’ll get the drift: “…between which/wind-run sand/settles tiny landscapes, crumbling angles/some small shift in/water or particle, some/colour/stops it/into structure”.

My workaday slashes, showing where the lines break, can’t really do justice to the almost painterly way that Tarlo shapes the language on the blank white paper.

The other Yorkshire poet in the collection is Mark Dickinson from Scarborough, who is a film-maker and sound artist as well as a poet; like Tarlo’s, his words sometimes also appear to be blown across the page, but the effect is stunning, like when he describes “Tiny individual/Cloud-lets/Smaller than/Scales/On a fish” in a few words that cover half an otherwise empty page and are sharper and better defined for that.

This is a collection full of delights and wonders; read it and see and hear and feel the landscape anew. Then go wandering lonely; take a notebook and put some words on a page. And don’t tread on any daffodils.

The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry edited by Harriet Tarlo is published by Shearsman Books. For more information visit www.shearsman.com or to order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk