Mædwe by Corinna Board
Salò Press
The poems in Mædwe (‘meadow’ in Old English) evoke fields, meadows and the creatures or plants that inhabit them. In this pamphlet, there are foxes, barn owls, skylarks… Dandelions roar, a brook answers questions, grass sings, and a human tries but fails to translate a curlew’s song.
There is joy in greening; equally, in the playful methods deployed to represent something so wild, more-than-human, and beyond order. That’s what Corinna Board’s Mædwe communicates, through the pastoral and lostoral; in the way she manoeuvres Old English language, typography and form, and a bucolic childhood lost to both the speaker and our accelerated world. These poems of meadows, fields and creatures burst forth with fierce energy like the ‘frothy mess’ of cuckoo spit around a green stem. Will we listen? Yes, ‘more song! (please) more song!’
– Tom Branfoot
The poems in Mædwe engage with a part of the natural world that is ‘fenced in’, ‘picked clean’ by humans, and yet still holds its own wildness. Corinna Board draws us so close to her subject that the boundaries between human and more-than-human begin to dissolve. These poems search for ways to ‘translate’ for and give voice to fields, meadows, foxes and curlews, while also telling the stories of people who lived and died in these places. Holding many versions of grief and many versions of truth, Mædwe is a clear-sighted collection of poems. Never shying away from death and the damage humans do, Board’s empathy for, and delight in all forms of life never wavers. ‘If I buried my heart, what would grow?’ Perhaps something akin to these poems.
– Sophia Argyris
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