Ash Before Oak

There are certain texts that grip you from the first instance — an arresting opening line, a surprising set up, an unusual voice leaping out from the page at you. Others, like Ash Before Oak by Jeremy Cooper has you turning pages with its gentle observation of the world which hang just outside of “plotting”. It tugs at the part of your brain which wants to put together a complete picture of what you’re being told — we are used to having the entire machine of a story slowly revealed to us. That is not the case here, we are on a journey with the narrative voice to construct everything as it is observed.

The prose comes in the form of short diary entries around the reconstruction and renovation of a countryside home. There is an intentional engagement with the nature around the protagonist, but with intentional ignorance — as if to capture not what a thing is named, a key obsession throughout, but its “true” and observed character.

It’s hard to provide much in the way of the gravitas of the book here in snippets, because it’s the calmative effect that has you reaching for more. The privateness of the text is part of what could be hyperbolically called momentum. Throughout the piling up of entries we are let a little more into the mind of the narrator, and learn how their search for a position of our observation is actually their gentle agreement with the chaos of the world, hoping only for managed wildness and maintained decay.

Ash Before Oak won last year’s Fitzcarraldo Novel Prize, so this is a good reminder to send them your weird meditative fiction.

What a poem to have someone write for your wedding.

Our favourite horse poet, Rosebud Ben-Oni, is editing an edition of Pleiades magazine in honour of the 150th birthday of the periodic table. It’s a wonderful and mad starting point for something. You have until the 15th July.

Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own. It was written by randomly, but very luckily, dropping things on the keyboard. Who dropped those things? @CJEggett. Where can you send your dropping-things-enthusiast friends to sign up to this? Right here on this tiny letter page. I really liked this video by Alan Trotter, writer of Muscle, about B. S. Johnson — it’s interesting and witty (although it does have stuff about cancer and suicide in it, so be warned) — you can watch it here. It contains the writer saying to the camera “I am going to read some poems now, so it might be a good time to make a cup of tea”. I went to Wales and all I saw were these earthy lumps.