{"id":12134,"date":"2021-11-09T15:55:34","date_gmt":"2021-11-09T14:55:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12134"},"modified":"2021-11-09T15:56:52","modified_gmt":"2021-11-09T14:56:52","slug":"sarah-westcott-bloom-reviewed-by-ken-evans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12134","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Westcott, <\/strong>Bloom<\/em><\/strong>, reviewed by Ken Evans"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Sarah Westcott, Bloom, Pavilion Press, University of Liverpool: (\u00a39.99)<\/strong><\/p>\n

In her second collection \u2013 what the poet refers to as the \u2018sister\u2019 to her first, called Slant Light<\/em> \u2013 Westcott sets out her intention from the first line of the opening poem:<\/p>\n

\u2018Have you looked,
\nHave you looked deeply \u2013<\/p>\n

the feeling,
\n<\/em>the feeling is what I mean.\u2019<\/p>\n

Her subject is the natural world, and how it bleeds into us and we, into it, in almost osmotic exchanges. \u2018The world is flux, and light becomes what it touches,\u2019 wrote US poet Lisel Mueller (\u2018Monet Refusing the Operation\u2019). Westcott dramatises this transformative exchange in detailed language, which accepts its own failure, ultimately, to explain all the mysteries and complexities of the natural world, as it is –<\/p>\n

\u2018Language: a barrier, a raft of sticks, a child with a nest in his\/hands\/\u2019 (Apples).<\/p>\n

Westcott blends dynamic, sensual language with the scientific, which reminded me of plant scientist poet, Sarah Watkinson. \u2018April: frothing and foaming,\/cuckoo spit dripping from its mouth.\/Cellular thrumming in wet light.\u2019 In \u2018Cherries\u2019, the skin, that is both the fruits\u2019 own and also seemingly, the narrators, might break, and contain \u2018glistening drupes\u2019, a botanical term for a seed or nut. In \u2018Princess\u2019, flowers have \u2018gracile\u2019 heads, a term drawn from anthropology.<\/p>\n

But whereas in Watkinson\u2019s work, the empirical scientific lens always \u2018frames\u2019 and therefore detaches, the poet-narrator of Bloom\u00a0<\/em>seems to almost bodily flow, meld and join with the natural world. As in the poem \u2018Dancer\u2019 where, \u2018my brain is millions of buds picked out against the air,\/I am a shape of chemical channellings, electrical lengths,\/impenetrable and porous.\u2019 The experience is visceral, with a consciousness of the mutability of skin, blood, bone and milk (as in a poem about breast-feeding, where \u2018All night he\u2019s on me like a lamb\/and it is a love act, this feeding\/fit to his wet mouth, his baby guts,\/sucked nest from the heart.\u2019 Later, the startling awareness the child is, literally and metaphorically, \u2018swallowing me\u2019 (Breast).<\/p>\n

In \u2018Songbird\u2019, Westcott\u2019s homage to Keats\u2019s \u2018Ode to a Nightingale\u2019, the bird\/Romantic poet\/narrator share a tender touch, \u2018I hold your voice lightly in my throat,\/no space in the note but itself \u2013 oh, touch my body tenderly\u2026the tone\/like an egg, line-less and unbroken \u2013 our throats skinned open and trembling.\u2019<\/p>\n

This intense dissolution between observer and observed is a kind of union that is fleeting and sacred, a membrane pierced, but also entering the poet, subcutaneously, in an almost mystical way. As well as the lamb, there are references to a cross and holly. But whereas the nature poetry of John Glenday in his Mariscat pamphlet on his birthplace and returned to home, the Firth of Tay, (The Firth) Glenday sees Nature with a capital \u2018N\u2019, as metaphor, teacher, and parable, and the angle of his \u2018voice\u2019 is therefore observational but outside the experience, Westcott\u2019s narrator-poet seems to commune and dissolve into the natural environment, or at least, seeks to: \u2018Into mutability, something held back between the pools & the\/working river & lets me half in, I sit with rabbits to eat. \u2013.\u2019 This immersive, shifting, restlessness, \u2018Always the beat of blood, drawn through the world\u2019 (The Field) of the natural, is emphasized through frequent use of the em-dash, ten usages, in \u2018Birdsong\u2019 alone, for example. In its capacity as a punctuation device to suggest both interruption and amplification, it seems to create a simulacrum of a bird\u2019s forever nervy, twitching song, as well as suggesting the way our own auditory attention is wrestled with and then slips on in a barrage of bird voices, each grabbing at our attention in stops and starts, as we listen and try to distinguish one from another, before moving on.<\/p>\n

This close inter- and intra-connectedness with, and of, nature, could become a little too performative, \u2018showy\u2019 and pantheistic, as the appeal to the loss of self-consciousness in dissolution in nature reveals itself as its polar opposite, an acute solipsism. Westcott skilfully avoids this trap, by rooting her poems in actual events (the response in floral tributes to the death of Princess Diana, for example); or in \u2018Breast\u2019 (about a new mother\u2019s experience of feeding a baby); or in Desert Holly, where the poet approaches the horrors of a \u2018mass shooter\u2019 in the US, through an art installation about the event, in which the perpetrator killed randomly at a Las Vegas rock concert.<\/p>\n

Image and an exact precision and sincerity of expression also help avert the dangers of the overblown, fey, whimsical or abstract. In \u2018Common Orange Lichen\u2019, the lichen is compared to Scotland\u2019s sugary, fizzy drink, \u2018Irn-Bru\u2019 and a \u2018fry-up on the roof\u2019. It\u2019s stubborn clinging to stone and other surfaces is \u2018mulish\u2019\u2026\u2019mottled underparts like bark,\/so choral I would like to join your choir.\u2019 In \u2018Spring Fragments\u2019 \u2018I see one aeroplane\/the contrails break into genetic code\/ chromosomes opening into further forms\/up the cow parsley comes.\u2019<\/p>\n

This second of the Westcott\u2019s \u2018sister\u2019 collections shows us a powerful nature poet unafraid of a bolder reach in expression, where we are \u2018one layer of carbon\u2019 (The Turn) among so many others in nature, but one grounded in the particularity and exactitude of that world.<\/p>\n

by Ken Evans<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Sarah Westcott, Bloom, Pavilion Press, University of Liverpool: (\u00a39.99) In her second collection \u2013 what the poet refers to as the \u2018sister\u2019 to her first, called Slant Light \u2013 Westcott sets out her intention from the first line of the opening poem: \u2018Have you looked, Have you looked deeply \u2013 the feeling, the feeling is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[283,18],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nSarah Westcott, Bloom, reviewed by Ken Evans - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12134\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sarah Westcott, Bloom, reviewed by Ken Evans - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sarah Westcott, Bloom, Pavilion Press, University of Liverpool: (\u00a39.99) In her second collection \u2013 what the poet refers to as the \u2018sister\u2019 to her first, called Slant Light \u2013 Westcott sets out her intention from the first line of the opening poem: \u2018Have you looked, Have you looked deeply \u2013 the feeling, the feeling is […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12134\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2021-11-09T14:55:34+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2021-11-09T14:56:52+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/i.postimg.cc\/vZBfyrqg\/9781800348707.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"The Manchester Review\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12134\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12134\",\"name\":\"Sarah Westcott, Bloom, reviewed by Ken Evans - The Manchester Review\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2021-11-09T14:55:34+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2021-11-09T14:56:52+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/e6deb0374609919f6e86f6ee1defe8cc\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12134#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12134\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=12134#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Sarah Westcott, Bloom, reviewed by Ken Evans\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/\",\"name\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"description\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/e6deb0374609919f6e86f6ee1defe8cc\",\"name\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif\",\"caption\":\"The Manchester Review\"},\"description\":\"The Manchester Review was founded in 2008 and is published by the Centre for New Writing at The University of Manchester. 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