We Saw it all Happen by Julian Bishop

 

 A former Environment Reporter for BBC Wales, Julian Bishop recently published this first collection of eco-themed poetry. All the poems are beautifully written, thoughtful meditations on aspects of the environmental crises we're facing, climate change and biodiversity loss. 

The title poem of the collection shows the narrator eating seafood while flicking through nature programmes showing the decline of marine life.

Useful Creatures opens with the lines:

Nature as always, seen through the lens of the I,

hooked on utility for mankind.  

Which for me seems to be a pervasive standpoint these days, even organisations that are set up ostensibly to preserve nature often seem to only value that nature for the ways in which it can serve humans, while ignoring that nature itself should be preserved for its own value. And how easily we seem to be able to ignore the crises happening around us: 

how so many only reflect on melting ice 

when it is raised in a tumbler. 

 

from At the Ice House

The standout poem for me is Lobster (which you can read here on Julian's Twitter feed). This features a lobster that has developed a taste for hiding amongst Pepsi cans - thus highlighting issues around ocean pollution and consumerism. 

I was very pleased to find several poems highlighting the fate of insects - Dung Beetle outlines the effect of insecticides on these valuable creatures, while Darwin's Beetle Box observes how collecting insects has caused declines in their populations. Welcome to Hotel Extinction profiles an imaginary hotel 'committed to total elimination' of insects (and all other natural life) and Driven to Extinction compares the narrator's childhood when driving used to be:

blizzard of insect wings / smeared windscreen a grisly scene

to the fact that:

Now, Cinnabar Moths are as rare as flares or a waterbed. 

I drive home at nightfall through streets 

marbled with light, the future clear as the road ahead.  

 

This is an excellent collection, though the overall tone can seem to be down-beat and even doom-laden, which is of course entirely understandable given the crises we're living through. The two most hopeful poems don't even refer to the environmental crises at all but use the beauty of nature as a symbol of hope for other aspects of life. 

 

Celandines and Blue Skies is a beautiful poem for Ukraine, featuring the colours of the Ukrainian flag and the hope provided by the resilient yellow celandines that emerge so early in the year. I Found a Bluebell Wood is similarly a poem of hope in a time of crisis, this time the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis:

a congregation of flowers at prayer

while we prayed for the dying elsewhere 

on wards the colour of those Spanish hyacinths. 

 

 So a collection well worth reading, this comes from Fly on the Wall Press, based in Manchester (the city where I was born!) a publisher with a conscience that publishes literature on social and environmental themes.

 We Saw it all Happen by Julian Bishop published (2023) by Fly on the Wall Press.