Abstract
This collection of poems develops the author's contribution to ecopoetics, inventing new forms to think through relationships with the more-than-human world. Taking its title from a line in the 1938 film Hôtel du Nord, it brings background into the foreground.
Epiphytic plants are indicators of temperate rainforests, such as those found in north Wales. These plants, such as the polypody fern, are neither rooted nor parasitic but draw nutrients from the mist, dust and decay around them. This collection proposes an epiphytic poetics, introduced through a visual sequence structured as fern fronds. It explores interdependence through the slow, many-footed movement of plants, as understood through the work of the philosopher Emanuele Coccia.
A series of ‘variations’ or extended riffs writing back to the poems of Arnaut Daniel amplifies the presence of birds in troubadour poetry, listening to the song production of birds and humans through the context of twenty-first century technologies. While these are not translations in any conventional sense, they respond to Jacques Roubaud’s French translations of the troubadours as an early avant-garde, as well as translations and commentaries by Lisa Robertson and Jonathan Skinner.
If birds speak in place-inflected languages, how does language shape the sonic atmosphere we inhabit? A sequence addressing the medieval Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym tunes in to his attention to the sound of birds in a defamiliarized English unsettled by its co-presence with Welsh. The ‘llatai’ or messenger, a device in Welsh poetry in which a bird or object carries a message to the beloved, offers a means of exploring human feeling in a technological landscape.
Responses to poems by the Kichwa poet Yana Lucila Lema Otavalo from Ecuador and the Turkish poet Gonca Özmen reflect shared thinking across boundaries and unknown languages, where non-human elements provide a point of connection and improvisation in sound. The re-sounding of other languages through English is a counterbalance to the idea of global accessibility and availability. These experimental echoes across geographical or cultural spaces recognise the plurality of poetry as well as the varying effects and impacts of climate change and species loss.
Faced with the inseparability of the non-human world from the destructiveness of human activity, these poems trace linked materialities across times and places. The mussel, as a regenerative presence in oceans, connects the coast of north Wales with fishing communities world-wide; the calcium of its shell is also present in the limestone of the Norman castles that colonised Wales, and in human bones. A sequence on the seven types of plastic, as separated for recycling, is a grammar of waste, aligned with seven word classes. The atmosphere is under our skin and in our bones.
Epiphytic plants are indicators of temperate rainforests, such as those found in north Wales. These plants, such as the polypody fern, are neither rooted nor parasitic but draw nutrients from the mist, dust and decay around them. This collection proposes an epiphytic poetics, introduced through a visual sequence structured as fern fronds. It explores interdependence through the slow, many-footed movement of plants, as understood through the work of the philosopher Emanuele Coccia.
A series of ‘variations’ or extended riffs writing back to the poems of Arnaut Daniel amplifies the presence of birds in troubadour poetry, listening to the song production of birds and humans through the context of twenty-first century technologies. While these are not translations in any conventional sense, they respond to Jacques Roubaud’s French translations of the troubadours as an early avant-garde, as well as translations and commentaries by Lisa Robertson and Jonathan Skinner.
If birds speak in place-inflected languages, how does language shape the sonic atmosphere we inhabit? A sequence addressing the medieval Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym tunes in to his attention to the sound of birds in a defamiliarized English unsettled by its co-presence with Welsh. The ‘llatai’ or messenger, a device in Welsh poetry in which a bird or object carries a message to the beloved, offers a means of exploring human feeling in a technological landscape.
Responses to poems by the Kichwa poet Yana Lucila Lema Otavalo from Ecuador and the Turkish poet Gonca Özmen reflect shared thinking across boundaries and unknown languages, where non-human elements provide a point of connection and improvisation in sound. The re-sounding of other languages through English is a counterbalance to the idea of global accessibility and availability. These experimental echoes across geographical or cultural spaces recognise the plurality of poetry as well as the varying effects and impacts of climate change and species loss.
Faced with the inseparability of the non-human world from the destructiveness of human activity, these poems trace linked materialities across times and places. The mussel, as a regenerative presence in oceans, connects the coast of north Wales with fishing communities world-wide; the calcium of its shell is also present in the limestone of the Norman castles that colonised Wales, and in human bones. A sequence on the seven types of plastic, as separated for recycling, is a grammar of waste, aligned with seven word classes. The atmosphere is under our skin and in our bones.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Carcanet Press Ltd. |
| Number of pages | 72 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781800175389 |
| Publication status | Published - 28 Feb 2026 |
