‘Like any prophetic text, these poems are multi-purposed: they raise alarm and they praise creation.’ Photo: Book cover of Out of Excuses: The Loving Earth poetry book, edited by Tracey Martin
Out of Excuses: The Loving Earth poetry book, edited by Tracey Martin
Edited by Tracey Martin. Review by Dana Smith
This is a unique climate text. A colourful book, the size of a double CD, it is part of the Loving Earth Project, which has been exhibited in the UK, France, Belgium and the US.
The poems written to accompany these images make for a fully interactive experience. The book is more than a companion into the dark of climate collapse. It’s a book which calls us to active engagement, here and now. The text asks you and me as readers to gently gaze at panels; to notice feelings that arise; to be aware of surprises.
It invites us to play, to acknowledge what we can and cannot change. It also asks us to be brave and to share our responses in a variety of ways, online and with one another. The creators of the book show us how this might be done.
Like any prophetic text, these poems are multi-purposed: they raise alarm and they praise creation. They call us back to our beginnings, ask us to acknowledge our ability to distinguish between light and dark, and thereby to be co-creators with our universe.
The first poem in the collection, ‘A Place Called Home’, gazes with us into a mountained patchwork, acknowledging our human ‘viral load’. We range from the lyricism of ‘Church Bells Beyond The Stars Heard’ to ‘Talking Rubbish’ where a lonely octopus chats with a plastic bag.
Pages enchant us with ‘orb weavers and holly trees’, while lacework stitched and felted is entitled ‘A Hurricane Called Grace’. Praise songs acknowledging ‘our living cathedral, our fragile lives’ stand alongside the rhythm of difficult words: ‘I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe.’ This time not spoken by a human but by our planet.
Love poems cross the equator, seeking true direction for all of us. Artists ‘Sew love, baste back, knit pearl blue’ with supple texts of ‘English jueju’ echoing Tang dynasty poets.
We are challenged to question truisms, ‘Are there more fish in the sea?’ A writer imprisoned for nonviolent disruption and uncomfortable actions: ‘informs, implores and impels us’ in the name of truth, hope and love.
Ultimately the poets in this collection – some of Britain’s most celebrated, others less known – bring the wind of named and unnamed storms that much closer.
As Chaucer said, ‘Go little book’, may we support the Loving Earth Project as it seeks with us to ‘Mend the World’.
