Page 115 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

the silted stench

of her last

birthing.

Notes:

'Tope' will appear in my fourth collection, due to be published by Cinnamon Press in 2017. I'm

currently poet-in-residence with the Marine Conservation Society in the UK, writing poems and

running poetry workshops for the organisation's Thirty Threatened Species project. This venture

aims to raise wider awareness of the plight of thirty marine species, all of whom appear on the

IUCN Red List. They include such iconic creatures as the Atlantic puffin and sperm whale, as

well as beings about whom we know comparatively little, like the angel and frilled sharks.

In addition to engaging with the theme of loss, I have an enduring fascination with human-

animal/non-human-animal metamorphosis: my most recent collection, skindancing (Cinanmon

Press, 2015) focuses exclusively on this subject, exploring both our intimacy with, and alienation

from, our animal selves and the wider natural world. This 'becoming animal' theme continues to

be present in many of my marine conservation poems-in-progress, where I'm still grappling with

such questions as: where is the borderline between humanity and animality? what are the

animal possibilities of the self? I'm especially interested in considering these questions in light of

the fact that our behaviour (including overfishing, habitat destruction, profligate production of

plastic debris) has caused the near-extinction of so many marine creatures. How comfortably

may we 'become animal' and 'make kin' in this context?

Much of the language in 'Tope' has been chosen for reasons of sound: my aim was to create a

chain of assonance, part-rhymes and words-packed-with-plosives so that the reader is drawn

through the poem from sound echo to sound echo, just as the tope shark is drawn, by its

extraordinary olfactory ability, through the water from smell to smell.