|
One of the world’s greatest writers, by some beautiful fortune, chose the sea as her subject. In her acceptance speech, when she won the National Book Award in 1952 for The Sea Around Us, she said: The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry… Today, I got to kneel in loosely blown sand on the oceanfloor and write. I knelt in front of a Pink Smith Damselfish: a dive slate on my wrist, a flounder beside my knee, wet book and stubby pencil in my hand. One of the things I hadn't thought about before learning to dive was holding hands. Sometimes I feel we adults can talk a little too much with an empty space between us and no connection or understanding. The dives have been mute, and yet so full of dialogue, there's been so much laughter under the water, reassurance, affirmations, touch, eye contact that felt more like conversations, physical slapstick, support, and most of all, us all holding onto each other and not letting anyone twist off course, be lifted by the current, or float up too far. It was my friend's turn to be the balloon today and I the kiteflyer, whose hand reached up and caught hers. The level of contact is the kind you give and get when nursing and caring for someone. I felt held all day: by the water and one another. Whenever I write poetry in the sea, I think of Rachel Carson. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, she thought of the prose she wrote as poetry, and was called the scientist-poet of the sea. Because we know land better than water, she is more well respected for Silent Spring, her final book, but it is her sea trilogy that I’ve taken into my heart and think is her most evocative writing: The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea and Under the Sea-Wind. She once told a friend that after her death, she wanted to be re-incarnated as a tern. To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.” In her life, she only got to dive once. From her writing, you would think she could only exist underwater. She made the quiet sea crackle for me when I read about and listened to the seafloor through archive recordings that she'd described - which had just been captured in the 1940s. I think often of how much the oceans need her hope and sense of wonder now, her voice.
9 Comments
 A few years back, I came across a book in which the authors sat on a beach and read Richard Jefferies' autobiography, The Story of My Heart until the waves reached their toes. The duration of their reading was the duration of a changing tide. I love the idea of the sea as a timer, an hourglass, sucked in at the waist, then eating its fill.
Recently, I’ve been experimenting with the length of poems. In May, I composed a poem whilst walking along a friend’s lane in Drisheen in rural Cork. Each night I’d walk this lane, just as the light was almost gone. Often by the time I returned it would be dark, and the bats would be on their circuits above me. This lane is the same lane where my uncle was carried from a wake-house to the cemetery where he is buried. It was his last journey, and our last with him. It is a lane where I’ve felt many things throughout the years: despair, bliss, comfort, awe, grief, giddy happiness, the beginnings of love. It is what you’d call a deep lane, a green lane, an ancient way, or a holloway - the track is low as a trench beneath the fields at some parts, it is like a walled garden in others and at night there is such a complete blackout that you can’t see your feet. You walk like an astronaut - slow, high steps. It allows you to believe we’re in space and a dark place in this messy rift of stars and planets. One night, a sentence came to me as I was heading up. The line was: To walk along the lane at night, is to see god and to see god is to know yourself. I am not a religious person, god has never entered my writing, so this line took me by surprise. I decided to take the line for a walk the next day and speak the poem to the air, using a dictaphone. The length and time it took to walk the lane, would be the length of the poem and time it took to make the poem. Each turn in the track was a new stanza. There were two small intermissions when I stopped to chat to a painter who lives halfway down the lane, and when my cousins turned into the bottom of the lane as I was mid-description, looking at and tasting hairy bittercress. The shape of the poem became a Haibun - a mixture of natural history prose-poetry, with shots of haiku. The haikus - were for each time I looked out from the lane to the surrounding farms, mountains and hills. The prose-poetry was what was nearest - at my feet and beside me. Each new turn in the track brought a different viewpoint and the flora changed from short stubby turgid stars growing on dry rocks at the top, to wet ditches of bittercress at the bottom. I finished the poem when my feet hit the borderline of water at the estuary - I'd started it from above the trees. The sentence that initally began the poem hasn't made it into the final version, but the sense and power of this place hopefully has. |
Author
Anna Selby is a naturalist and poet. 
Archives
December 2020
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed