Volvelle by Rachael Boast
Picador Poetry (Pan Macmillan)
Volvelle, Rachael Boast's fifth collection, pulls at the thread linking our contemporary anxieties concerning fragmentation and technological acceleration to the need to sustain ancient forms of connection with one another and the planet. Embodying something of this in its elegant, recurring consonants ' conjuring love, revolve, evolve ' is the titular volvelle: a medieval analogue computer made of paper and used to perform an enormous range of calculations, from tracking animal breeding patterns to following the cycles of the sun and moon. Myriad as the uses of the volvelle are Boast's influences: there are poems here in the realm of Tennyson, Lorca and Cocteau, lines that move in the atmospheres of European arthouse cinema, and others in conversation with Akhmatova, Mirabai and Sufi poetry. Though her attentions are roving, the health of the body politic soon emerges as the focus of Boast's passionate collection, fusing poetry with reportage on conflicts and ecocide to call into being a 'language of injury'. With a keen sense of heritage and interconnectedness, Volvelle circles the question of what it means to be human in an age of anxiety and hyper-materialism.
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