Cranic of Ordinaries by Eliza O'Toole
The Poetry Book Society
This cranic, or skull, of ordinaries is a landscape well-known to poet Eliza O'Toole who has long tramped the Stour Valley on the Suffolk-Essex border with her dog Fin, nose-down tail-up, urging her on. In the muddy paint-water of John Constable and the rambling madness of John Clare, O'Toole takes her own step lightly into a calendar year of a landscape displaced. Chronicling the cycle of seasons, book-ended by (poisonous) aconites, these poems are decisive moments in time that mark life-death-decay, as a series of alternative, textual landscape paintings.
At times raw, O'Toole points toward the corrosion of landscape rendered in words or oils by a masculine eye and the ironic subsequent degradation of this pastoral idyll by ongoing very real eco-losses and agri-changes. Yet, in elevating the landscape unto itself, a complex undergrowth of magnetic field work emerges and from that, the lithe 'isness' of place which never fully subscribes to human cartographics and which, in its fundament, will long outlast us.
"This collection of poetry is earthed with the most intricately fused and intelligent forms of the Lyric I have ever read. Each line and phrase so unpredictably, yet naturally, cultivates its context, making new orders of linguistic substance, and in this way is truly Nature poetry, with interacting points-of-view between weed, word, weather, dog; we move and make our way through each poem as a witness that is part of the chorus and part of the scene." —Holly Pester
MEMBERS ENJOY 25% OFF ALL POETRY BOOKS
Join the Poetry Book Society for 25% off all books
Join the Poetry Book Society for 25% off all books