’an ancient, woven, wet, ditch-dance’

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s book ‘Twelve Words for Moss’ is not exactly a scientific book, although it contains a lot of botanical information. It’s more a series of meditations on moss and (trying to delay too-glib a rhyme) loss, specifically the loss of her father. Both nature writing and grief memoir, it is also interspersed with Burnett’s poetry.

’Rootless roots, wireless wires,
spreading underneath with fire green and simmering
with snow, crushing in between the toes, a light leaf-fall that dusts
and winnows, a shoal of sinking, threaded minnows, flashing in between the nodes,
climbing deep, transmitting slow, following each old advance in this technology
of plants, an ancient, woven, wet, ditch-dance, where anyone can take a turn,’

(from ‘Wool Wi-Fi, Sphagnum fallacy, Flat-topped Bog-moss’)

I don’t think I’ll ever be a moss person like Burnett, nor an enthusiast for the boggy landscapes where she goes hunting, but I admire her close focus and attention to detail. I like also her particular attunement to language, which comes in part from her mixed heritage; generations of Devonians on her father’s side, and Kenyan origins through her mother:

“In Kenya, asking for the names of plants had been no easy business, The answers would come first in Kikuyu, or Kiyembu – local dialects. Then, after some conferring, a Swahili equivalent would be suggested. English would be the last stop on this naming journey, provided either by a cousin or my mother………..I think of my own (name) and how a hyphen lends a way into multiplicity. In Old English kennings, words are joined together – whale-road for sea, sky-candle for sun – so that I start to wonder about kennings for mosses: star-grass; leaf-glass. In Swahili, some words can also be doubled, so that the first impression, rather than being coupled with another, is reinforced. The Swahili word for memory is ‘kumbukumbu’ “

She’s very good too at making analogies between the act of reading and the experience of being knee-deep in moss, up close with a magnifying glass. This passage is a wonderful evocation of the discovery of a new writer, one that you recognise as yours, startlingly new but simultaneously familiar, just what you didn’t realise you were waiting for:

”I wonder what it is I am really seeing when I look at this moss. If I can liken it to anything, which I almost can’t, it would be that feeling of reading, when words that once seemed so familiar appear to have caught fire and assumed new shapes, startling and extraordinary, yet also not new. …It is a feeling of symmetry and strangeness together, an alertness and a familiarity.”

I think of my first readings of John Berryman, W.S.Graham, Shane McCrae or Louise Gluck.

I think also, in the following excerpt, of the slowness of poetry, how long it can take to come to terms with a poet, not so much an understanding, more the finding of a way to hear them properly. Which can take time, patience, and frustration.

”..silence is a kind of blood that works from the ground, up. Internal, integral; with tactile qualities – spaces that you can sit in and listen and wait, places to absorb, to draw in, inflate. For before the first words, there are the first rhythms. The deep rustle of sleep. The furl and unfurling of fingers.. “

And on the subject of silence, I feel an affinity for her words about Wicken Fen. It’s a nature reserve, halfway between Ely and Cambridge, where the National Trust have preserved, or re-created an area of traditional fenland ecology which would otherwise have been lost to modern farming practices. I was there this year in early summer, staying in a National Trust cottage. Here’s what Burnett says about the place:

”I find it hard to articulate what pulls me in to a particular place, or, once the initial attraction has occurred, what I do with it. I often wont know in advance what will happen and that waiting and stillness are part of the process…….. (my practice is) like a tuning in to different kinds of time that are already in motion….like the slowness of moss, or soil, or the deep accumulation of peat.”

She doesn’t make the analogy, but if you substitute ‘book’ for ‘place’ it reminds me of the meandering trajectory of my own reading. I never quite know which poet will catch my eye next, even when I’ve made a reading list. Particularly when I’ve made a reading list. I decide to catch up on contemporary work and then find myself diverting to something I chanced upon in the library or secondhand bookshop. And you can only read one poem, one book at a time. You can’t be in two different places simultaneously (online doesn’t count). Slowness and indirection – it takes the time it takes and goes the way it will.