Nature Book Reader June 2020 - Flipbook - Page 130
A Nature Book Reader
EMMA WARREN
Emma Warren is a writer, editor, and broadcaster, and a bringer together
of unexpected things. Her book ‘Make Some Space: Tuning Into Total
Refreshment Centre’, about the grassroots venues which generate our culture,
was published in 2019.
Deep Lane by Mark Doty
New York poet and memoirist
Mark Doty is better known
for writing about urban gay
life than nature. His ninth
collection, published earlier
this year and written in a
studio outside a cottage in
a rural part of Long Island,
shows the natural world as
seen through his urban prism.
He trawls the countryside for
familiar undercurrents and
presents them back to us with
language and imagery that
is precise and colourful and
resonant.
The collection moves
around the seesaw pull
of desire and release with
Doty dragging these themes
up from the soil like the
‘jewel-toned’ radishes he
picks in his garden. He’s
expert in ecstasy in the more
chemical sense, too. Crystal
130
starts with someone rubbing
‘the clear envelope with
the backside of a spoon/
Milk-sheen feldspar brought
up from the dark’ before
describing the tourniquet
tied around his arm. The
resulting high sees ‘time
peeled back/ its own clear
skin, a jellyfish/ inverting
itself/ in a convulsive act of
self-propulsion’. By the end
he’s riding all night on what
he calls Tear Me Apart Road,
and describing himself as ‘an
anemone/ swallowing its
own blossom’. It’s like Robert
MacFarlane in a parallel
universe crystal meth blow
out.
The underworld is only
ever a few spade digs away.
The opening poem has him
on his knees, pulling up wild
mustard, talking to the ‘anvil
