Seasonal Disturbances
by Karen McCarthy Woolf
Genres: PoetryPages: 84
Rating:
Synopsis:A 2017 Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Following her groundbreaking 2014 debut An Aviary of Small Birds ("technically perfect poems of winged heartbreak" - Observer), Karen McCarthy Woolf returns with Seasonal Disturbances. Set against a backdrop of ecological and emotional turbulence, these poems are charged yet meditative explorations of nature, the city, and the self. A sinister CEO presides over a dystopian hinterland where private detectives investigate crimes against hollyhocks; Halcyon is discovered as a dead kingfisher, washed up on an Italian beach. Lyrical and inventive, McCarthy Woolf's poems test classic and contemporary forms, from a disrupted zuihitsu that considers her relationship with water, to the landay, golden shovel, and gram of &. As a fifth-generation Londoner and daughter of a Jamaican emigre, McCarthy Woolf makes a variety of linguistic subversions that critique the rhetoric of the British class system. Political as they may be, these poems are not reportage: they aim to inspire what the author describes as an "activism of the heart, where we connect to and express forces of renewal and love."
That said, I can only review based on the experience I actually had, and that was pretty confusing. It felt at times like the different stanzas of poems had no relationship to one another at all (and I don’t just mean the one about water that was definitely deliberate, which taught me a new term, “zuihitsu”). Maybe I’m not clever enough for this! Though, clever or not, I have two degrees in English literature, did study poetry within that, and did get good grades, so take that for what that’s worth — partly personal taste, partly not knowing what a “zuihitsu” is in advance, etc.
There was a bit from ‘Ars Poetica 101’ that I did like and wanted to save for myself for later (excerpted below), so it wasn’t a wholly bad experience — but definitely not a great success for me.
Poetry is
what the sea sings to the
last insatiable human
who thinks he’s the only one with a voice
to flood the dark with music and
dance or wonder who we are
and why we’re here or how we
became I, so exclusively…
Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)
