There was a time when Rae Howells didn’t give West Cross Common very much thought. But then came lockdown and this “overgrown brambly place on the edge of the estate” turned out to be the only option for the daily walk. The family found that they had stumbled through a magic door. Their walks revealed not a scrubby bit of waste ground but a secret world of extraordinary beauty and complexity.
Howells’ poems shriek with the wonder of discovery. She’s like a madwoman with felted hair and a musty essence at a party who grabs you and babbles relentless nonsense, “close your eyes. listen. willow warblers and wrens, / unlit comets arcing between low trees, a blackbird’s alarm. / just stop. breathe. listen. skylark, snipe, a grass snake’s slide / through cotton grass. polecat. weasel. an otter’s crunch.” She is intoxicated by the Common, forced to rework language in an effort to encompass what she finds, “a conundrum of bats / zigzags an inquisition / on thin-boned leather wings”. There is such invention in these poems. How could you not resist Tormentil’s crowd of children who “run all about / midge-giddy / in their / growing up little / heliographs of joy”? Even the poems’ titles are a joy, “devil’s bit scabious”, “When adder went to the shops”, “sonnet for disturbed peat”, “Scrap Bracken / A Drowning”.
Howells is driven. I picture an artist, brush hopelessly overloaded, who wields it and wields it so that precious paint won’t be lost. I admire the collection so much, wild in every possible way. But there’s an urgency to the work here for “this soft flank of earth” is under threat. Developers wish to transform the anonymous “Land North of Chestnut Avenue” into affordable housing in a process which will sweep the astonishing Common away. Local resistance is growing and these poems in part illuminate and record that effort, “4.47am turn of some century / Mrs Hearn neither awake nor dreaming, / is starving for constellations.”
But most of all the book asks what sort of future we want for our world. “please, blow your clock, / and set free next summer’s seeds: / so our wild uncommon places / can feed tomorrow’s bees.” Very highly recommended.
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