Refusing to Stay Still
A Review of Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s “Of Sea”
Increasing attention has been paid to the environment. This summer’s record-breaking heatwaves have underscored the reality that the climate crisis is only increasingly in severity, while the lives of the most vulnerable are both more at risk and in greater danger. In environmental humanities classes, discussions about how to address the current climate crisis are often coupled with acknowledgements of burnout and exhaustion that fear and an emphasis on urgency bring. How can we talk about the environment given the current geo-political state? Is there respite to be found, or is bleakness the only thing on the horizon?
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s Of Sea is an indirect answer to this question, a poetry collection more about nature than the environment. Part of this distinction stems from the poems’ microcosmic lens, their slow observant state of a particular habitat — the Dawlish Warren, a seaside resort town in Devon, in the south of England — and its inhabitants — 39 invertebrates, to be exact, as Burnett states in the opening note. Where poems about the environment are often wordscapes rich with concern and determination, admiring the natural world through a lens like ecocriticism or history, nature poems like those in Of Sea are slower, observant. Each poem, which focuses on one of these invertebrates, is an encounter, both between the speaker and their immediate surroundings but also between the reader and these beings, the difference being in the degree of removal. Burnett acts as the facilitator of these encounters yet she is neither a tour guide nor a naturalist. Her poems are a form of transformative notetaking, where what might otherwise seem boring, mundane, at times even a little off-putting (as with “Millipede”), is an invitation to pause and contemplate. Burnett’s appreciation for these beings, whether explicitly or through her decision to write about them, is contagious, giving newfound appreciation for the invertebrates in question. Even the intimidating millipede becomes, in Burnett’s careful eye, “earth nymph,/soil swimmer, flow,/polish, the clear part/of any stone.”
Of Sea consists of seven sections — Sun, Moon, Below, Intermission: Call of the Sea, Above, Surfacing, Spilling — each of which give the reader a hint as to what kind of encounters they might expect. Burnett adopts different poetic styles and forms from one section to another, creating a compendium on a poetic as well as on an ecological level. “Ragworm” has rhyme and “Sun, a Sea-olet” makes use of a repeating structure. “Orange Ladybird” employs a reversable structure whereas “Ground Beetle” embodies a very sonic and performative quality. Built into these “studies” of invertebrates are glimmers of a discussion about language, about poetry and its adjacent forms. In “Echo (a sea-olet),” Burnett writes that “songs are homes made on the move, they dwell/in us and we in them, as moons.” Notably, a couple of pages later there is a piece titled “Song of the Sea” that is a song, notes written on a musical staff with accompanying words. Poetry is a secondary level of music, an interpretative layer gently draped over the soundscape of the Dawlish Warren, where a sea mouse shakes “the courses/of a swallowed sea” out of her hair and the green leaf worm contemplates its state: “Limbless./All I do is echo.”
This stylistic fluidity is matched by Burnett’s varied use of pronouns throughout Of Sea, employing I/we/us/she. This way, Burnett continuously reorients the speaker as well as the reader within nature. It also prevents the speaker from having the sole role of the observer, a role that is passed down second-hand to the reader. Some of the invertebrates are imagined as having their own voices and Burnett is careful not to make it yet another instance of anthropocentrism or “speaking for.” “Barrel Jellyfish,” the only poem that veers close to the territory of environmental poetry and one of my personal favourites in Of Sea, seems to speak not to the reader but past them in a collective voice. Part of the poem is instructions to the reader:
If we disappear
try us with different titles.
Say we were frost or fruit.
Say we were whale fat. Say we
were good for the economy, or don’t say anything.
Documentation’s poetic potential is slowly replaced by a critique of the narrativization and erasure involved in the process. The lines prior to this passage — “We be longing to peril, in press of/pressing on” — are not a desperate plea but a reaffirmation of presence, making the lines that follow a reconning of the oppositional aspect of a word as broad as “we.”
Not all the poems in Burnett’s collection are strict observations. In fact, some of them speak to bigger concerns and fidget with the zoom function on Burnett’s poetic camera, going beyond the physical boundaries of these small invertebrates. For instance, “Gatekeeper” pulls back the curtain on what otherwise might seem like a warm and sunny day spent by the seaside that has then been condensed into book form. Burnett writes of a future “[w]hen the unwhole, unmooned/surface is left” and there is “no/swimming in no sea […]/no swimming & no sea […]/no swimming & no clean,” picking up the ecocritical thread in “Barrel Jellyfish.” Such poems and passages do not detract from the reading experience, nor would it be fair to say that they darken what one might (incorrectly) assume is a light-hearted, breezy reading. When they come up, these moments are much like thoughts that seep into the mind as one is swimming, head popping up and down or shifting side to side, much like the language in Of Sea refuses to fully stay still, preferring to meander and expand at will.
While Of Sea might not seem like an urgent or overtly political nor even personal collection in a more reductive sense, Burnett’s poems are necessary at a time when climate change has caused a paralyzing hopelessness. Burnett’s ecopoetics are a respite, a hand that is offered to the reader, who is then taken outdoors and shown all the small forms of beauty that are still there to enjoy, that Burnett reminds us are okay to enjoy. The resulting enjoyment can take on unpredictable forms, which Of Sea encourages, giving readers a glimpse of what can happen when one looks not only with open eyes but also a willingness to establish new forms of interspecies relationality.
