This dazzling collection begins with an epigraph from Rainer Maria Rilke: "The work of the eyes is done. / Go now and do the heart-work on / the images imprisoned within you." There is plentiful evidence of "heart-work" in these poems. Morley, an ecologist and naturalist by background, combines the scientist’s observational precision with the poet’s imagination. The opening poem, "The Mist Net Releases Her Birds," is a ghazal, an Arabic form originally, its subject traditionally love and loss. It is written in couplets, each with a repeated last word as a refrain. "The pandemic makes prisoners of us" gives us the context. The poem ranges across the globe in a quest for togetherness and is underpinned with metaphors of flight and responses from the person being addressed, one of which is central to the collection, "We resist through poetry … poems are a kind of politics as well as religion."
The "wings of the ghazal" prepare us for numerous birds. A hummingbird vibrates on the page, "she havers / in the time warp of her / wingbeats" ("Rosy-Topaz Hummingbird"). There is a similar relish of the sounds of words in "Puffins on Bardsey":
rug-headed kerns
clemmed, clumping
up a skerry of sky
I liked the fact that Morley features scientific experiments and discoveries by women. "Swans" is dedicated to Caroline Herschel and her indexing of Flamsteed’s Observations of the Fixed Stars, 1798, with its gorgeous description of the comet named after her: "it’s swan’s neck of snow // dipping into the dark water of space." Anna Atkins uses sunlight to take photographs of seaweeds, "light-burned pictures in water" ("The First Book Printed by the Sun").
Morley’s use of the Romani language reflects his dual English/Romany heritage as it did in this book’s predecessor, Fury (2020). There are glossaries, though Morley has said elsewhere that he would ideally like the reader to derive meaning from the shape and sound of the Romani words alone. Using the language is a form of resistance against oppression. In "Storytelling," the poet gives a paper on the Romany language at an academic conference, "I spoke of its leopard-leap of dialects … // How the words galloped untethered …" Passion indeed, though It is greeted "cold applause" and a young lecturer asking about the point of all this "trash." For the poet, the point is to go on telling stories of the prejudices and privations faced by the Romany culture. Different voices include that of a caravan (or vardo): "I am a caravan. The eye of my door open to the vryámya (weather). / The Travellers douse me with benzína (petrol). I am unclean" ("Mermeyi Pesha").
There are poems about family, about Morley’s former work as a scientist. Emily Brontë, in a poem of the same name, contains her rage at winter’s advice to reject the first show of spring and "Make life bare." Yeats is summoned as a presiding spirit of intention in a poem towards the end of the book which echoes the opening ghazal’s wings and nets:
on a morning of insect wings and glimmer,
the mist melting over a mirror of water,
and go. I go with my quiver of mist nets.
"Growing primroses is also a process / of not growing them, a path of unlearning …" ("I Found Poems in the Fields"). I enjoyed travelling, listening and observing with David Morley in this absorbing and thought-provoking collection.
