Wonder as Liberation Practice
JLM Morton on ecopoetry in an age of fragmentation
A soldier’s red woollen coat is sprawled on the mudflats of the River Severn, twisted by the push and pull of the water, stinking of oil and coated in sand. It will soon be washed away again by the tide and the gravitational pull of the moon. But for now, the arm of the coat reaches towards the West of England. The sleeve is an entrance to a tunnel leading back to the past.
Throughout the writing of Red Handed, I was haunted by the image of a military redcoat. Made with the precious dye of cochineal beetles harvested from the pads of prickly pears in central America and woven from Cotswold wool produced by the sheep that have shaped the local landscape, the redcoat is a symbol of the dynamic interplay of human ingenuity and nature’s resilience. It is also an iconic symbol of Empire and the armies that patrolled and enforced the murderous expansion of British colonial rule. The Severn Estuary, site of the redcoat haunting, was a mighty conduit for trade between rural England and the rest of the world, connecting the textile mills of the West Country via canal to the Severn and the Atlantic Ocean. Jonathan Yeo’s 2024 painting of King Charles is testament to how deeply embedded the uniform is in the national imagination and is in many ways the most honest royal portrait there’s ever been, the red hue a sure reference to a legacy of bloodshed and violence, a reckoning with that history and the truth of the stories of rural England that some would rather forget.
Brush this under the carpet
Shears snip at a coastline, tearing it back
like fleece from a sheep.Graded, sorted, scoured and drawn
on the warp and weft of the globe.
Red Handed
The consequences of centuries of exploitation, deforestation, pollution, and disregard for ecological balance are now reaching their logical conclusion in ecosystem collapse, species extinction, and the shattering of the fragile bonds between human and more-than-human that in our hubris we thought we could transcend. But we are fastened to the Earth and its fate. Nature and our experience of it is history. Not just a mirror but a scale which has become profoundly unbalanced.
As I write this, the magnolia trees are coming into full bloom. Unfolding from improbable buds that look stiff and bristly as artificial turf, the flowers seem almost to tremble as they emerge into the cold air of early spring, before opening up to a kind of velvety confidence in the return of the light. The sight of those magnolias give me a feeling that is something like pleasure and fear all at once, and an impulse to cup the blossoms in my hands to both admire and protect them. Some years, when hard frosts or late snow arrive in April, the magnolias suffer and the tender blooms wither on the branch, overcome with a kind of brown dishevelment, a sort of unfulfilled desire. In recent years, I’ve come to think of this tree as both ecopoem and ecopoet, as images of magnolias on streets, in gardens and parks around the country, flood the social media of the poets I follow. It is a tree and a moment that seems to hold both vulnerability and resilience, the twin poles of ecopoetic practice.
Like nature, poetry is the human record. As Peter Gizzi remarked: ‘we’ve been writing through one rotten kingdom for time immemorial—we’ve always been here just next to the story. As long as there’ve been soldiers, there’ve been poets and it’s a long, sad, venerable tradition’. Amid the ruins of globalisation, poets turning their attention to ecopoetry should hardly be surprising. It is a genre concerned with deep ecologies, with conflict and kinship between human and other-than-human, with poetic practices that mirror an understanding of complexity and non-linearity, the unruly bringing together of people, place and nature. In his essay on ecopoetics, Nasrullah Mambol names the preoccupations of ecopoetics as a fascination with ‘how the human is situated within its habitat; how ‘home’ is defined and built; where (or whether) borders exist between body and world, human and other, space and place.’ These stories and concerns are our ecopoetic currency and we enrich one another as we enter into this exchange. This is no small thing in an era when our environment, our rights and social protections, the institutions of our body politic are being not just impoverished, but deliberately destroyed, stripped of every tendon, ligament and muscle, right down to the bone.
You are nothing. I am nothing. A jot. A brief moment in time. A temporary imprint in a temporary place. That knowledge brings humility and relief. No need to get a Messiah complex. There is only so much we can do. All the more reason to do it.
The unravelling of our world can feel epic in scale, mythical even. From within our collective sorrow over the unfolding devastation, a space can emerge, an opportunity to transcend our human exceptionalism, to recognise our kinship with the living world, to accumulate small acts of presence in the place of our existence. Hannah Arendt said poetic language ‘is a place, not a refuge,’ suggesting poetry is no safe space, but a place of exposure, uncertainty, a place of consideration, questioning and critique. In this way, the ecopoem is the antithesis of old certainties.
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice
‘Wild Iris’, Louise Glück
My own ecopoetic practice now is embodied, an emergence from Glück’s oblivion and a purposeful insertion of physicality and voice into place. It has been a surfacing. An arrival at the threshold of a home to which I feel I can belong, after the distancing experience of writing Red Handed, which attempted to decolonise the rural landscapes I live in. Reaching for renewal and interconnectedness in ways that are mycelial, chaotic, expansive, poems are made in and through movement and trespass through land, lake, hill, valley, forest, following a river from source to mouth. A ‘making’ that returns us to the original Greek root poesis.
water’s memory
is a home I stumble
into
‘You Run Through Me,’ Red Handed
For the ecopoet, the body is not a prison, but an extension of the living world, a porous boundary where poems can be an antidote to numbness. To foreground a kind of somatic poetics and write through the body is a way of what Jorie Graham calls ‘practising presence,’ to ‘show up with your body.’ We exist in a moment when we are encouraged to disconnect from each other, our environment and our bodies and enter a virtual world where materiality no longer exists. One of the deceptions of colonisation was the separation of ‘Man’ from ‘Nature’, human from ‘other,’ individual from collective, an ideological sleight of hand that facilitated domination and subordination. The system we live in now has amplified this distortion. Embodied practices, by contrast, cultivate conscious presence, using the body as a tool for healing, grounding, a holistic kin-keeping.
Black bodies, brown bodies, queer bodies, trans bodies, women’s bodies, will all have different relationships to and experiences of embodiment. Embodiment does not exist in a political or moral vacuum. And, as Jason Allen-Paisant explored so eloquently in his collection Thinking With Trees, embodiment is not without danger, particularly in the spaces of white middle-class leisure, where other bodies have been marginalised, minimised, erased, dehumanised.
Here you share the path with dogs
and must remember
to go walking in these woods is to face
a different idea of what human is
‘Finding Space III’, Jason Allen-Paisant
Ecopoetry understands the power lines that shape our experience of nature and run like a national grid across our landscapes. It recognises the visible as well as the nonvisible, the powerful and the powerless, the contemporary and the ancient, the human and the more-than-human, all the many layers that make up a place.
This notion of entanglement has gained ascendancy of late. In his book, Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake writes that recognition of the ‘bundles of relationships’ we are comprised of may feel new but really, it’s ‘a very, very old idea among humans . . . this feels more like a remembering that’s going on.’ But what are we to do with all this messy, oozy blurring of boundaries? Embodied ecopoetics offers an intriguing invitation which recognises that identifying our radical inter-connectedness, not focusing on our oppositions, is a potent place of alliance. What would it be to hold our collective nature, our branching filaments, in the service of resistance, in the service of joy, and its close relative, hope? ‘Nothing,’ Anne Michaels writes, ‘enrages the tyrant more than hope.’
So many of us!
So many of us!
. . . we shall by morning
inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.
‘Mushrooms’, Sylvia Plath
Lately, I have been working in a community woodland called Sladebank on the edge of Stroud town, sandwiched between a social housing estate and the National Landscape of the rolling Cotswold Hills made famous by Laurie Lee. It is a young woodland – less than 100 years old – a curious edgeland space where the human and more-than-human collide in creative and sometimes conflicted ways. Woodlands, like the redcoat, hold a special place in the British imagination which yearns for the original tracts of greenwood, spaces of freedom, concealment, adventure and abundance. But when Auden wrote, somewhat sharply, that ‘a culture is no better than its woods,’ he could have been talking about Sladebank.
The boundary pathway that separates houses from trees is strewn with old shed panels, broken window panes, bin bags, fly-tipped white and black goods, building materials, unidentifiable detritus, cans, bottles; music blares from bedroom windows disturbing the Red Hearth women who sing in the woods; storytellers enchant audiences with their tales in the roundhouse; youths throw rocks from the undergrowth at people gathering in the woodhenge. It has been an opportunity to observe the messy and sometimes violent interactions between human and other-than.
As much confrontation as engagement, the making of ecopoetics in this space has been an ongoing attempt at deep listening, an endeavour to witness the truth of what happens at the interface of town/country, so-called feral vs. tame, a paying of a particular kind of embodied attention. Practicing presence and showing up is a way to not only use our intuitive senses but to reawaken ourselves to the wonder of a world that has been dulled by the imaginative failures of late capitalism. Or, as Richard Mabey has put it, in Turning the Boat for Home, ‘the answer to the still present threat of a silent spring is for us to sing against the storm.’
This morning, as I walked the dog at Sladebank where the beech trees are coming into leaf and the ground is thick with wild garlic, I spotted the first cow parsley of the year on a bank of celandine and ivy along the path. A spindly grouping of stalks reaching toward the light, the lace-like white flowers are one of spring’s most vital signs. Cow parsley provides nectar and pollen for insects, deep taproots improve soil structure, water infiltration and nutrient absorption. Growing in abundance as the spring progresses, cow parsley is such a familiar sight in English hedgerows, woodland edges and meadows, you may hardly even notice it’s there - so very commonplace and yet so very critical to biodiversity and ecosystem health. Surrounded by the clashing forces of Sladebank Woods, cow parsley is just one sign of deep resilience. Could the wonder this holds for the ecopoet be, as Cole Arthur Riley suggests more broadly, a kind of liberation practice, the power of recognising our deep entanglement, the wisdom of our collective sentience:
It can feel foolish to pause and marvel at the stars when the world is burning. Or to find the world beautiful when you’ve known it to betray you. But wonder is a liberation practice. A reminder that we contain more than our tragedy. Beauty is our origin and our anchor.
Black Liturgies, Cole Arthur Riley
An industrialised late capitalist human world, with its colonising impulses and values has deadened many of us to the wild, leaving a profound sense of loss; or it has alienated us so completely that we can no longer identify with the heritage and character of the land. For writers, wonder is a flame that we carry in our hands, encouraging custodianship and care, passing the fire on through the stories we tell to inspire optimism in others. Imagination can express a kind of freedom that can’t be easily contained.
Words give expression to our unique experience. They matter because they survive us, and in their survival is a legacy. As Carolyn Forché has said, ‘art is what is left behind.’ Words are what we still carry within us when we are forced to leave, they matter because poetry is an action, because a poem is a pulse, a doorway, a scar that’s wiser than the wound, and loss is only the beginning. Ecopoetics is a way of waking up and leaning into the trouble. It is also a way of staying with our dreams, in the somnolent half-light of the poem that gives us the courage to feel, to listen, to speak.
Late Warning
In the dream zone of winter
scarlet elf cups are scanning the future,
acoustic mirrors funnelling soundwaves
into the drum of the earth’s core.
They hold all forms of time at once,
remembrance and discovery,
a kingdom clustered
in the temporal bowl of now.
Triggered by a change in temperature,
these feeders on the dead, these doulas
of spring, shoot into the air,
sporulating throats of fresh cells
as if life could be
infinite and bulbs could be rubbed
for the green cries
of ramson, cuckoo pint, snowdrop.
Who knows what they know
of separation. They call to us—
come closer. Through
the white noise of wind and traffic, lean
in, to the crucible. Dissolve
your fleshy borders—
feel after the fire,
how blissful the forest.
JLM Morton’s debut poetry collection is Red Handed (Broken Sleep Books, 2024), a Poetry Society Book of the year. Highly commended by the Forward Prizes, winner of the Laurie Lee, Geoffrey Dearmer and Poetry Archive Worldview prizes, JLM Morton’s work has been published in Poetry Review, Rialto, The London Magazine, Magma and elsewhere. Her new pamphlet Forest is a long poem of free verse and fifty cinquains, inspired by a residency at Sladebank Woods (Yew Tree Press, 2025). Juliette is a celebrant, arts producer and writer from the West of England, where she lives with her family. She is currenly writing her next book with the support of an Author’s Foundation grant.