I was a bit hesitant, fearing they might turn out an overhyped disappointment, a bit like Poet Laureate poems for official occasions.
Anything but, a real tour de force.
I am particularly impressed by the way the words of Darwin (& others) are incorporated into the poems, so that they seem like a real collaboration of different voices
I got a bit irritated & had to put it down –(oh, do get over such pettiness) – when she ended the section on John Edmonstone (the freed slave from Guiana who taught Darwin taxidermy) with
“he sees a harvest moon. A shadow-bruised melon
as over the Amazon”
as if that had something to do with Edmonstone. The Amazon does not flow in Guyana
Mind you, Edmonstone was born in the C18th when Guiana was not Guyana either. But the book written by Charles Waterton (the plantation owner who gave Edmonstone his freedom) specifies a trip “through the wilds of Demerara and Essequibo, a part of ci-devant Dutch Guiana, in South America” - nowhere near the Amazon
But then I discovered that these days ‘The Amazon’ covers much more than just the river
Not unlike Sir Walter Raleigh’s “large, rich & beautiful empire of Guiana”
The name of the modern country, Guyana, which occupies a small proportion of the coast of the Guianas, was derived from an Amerindian word meaning Land Of Many Waters, but that of the original spelling remains in dispute
It certainly means something much broader than a single, albeit most important, river, the Amazon, which has been adopted by modern romantics, Greens & climate change campaigners – who of course focus on the trees more than the waters
If I were back in the deeply Freudian 1960s I might worry about the subconscious of those who prefer to associate themselves, romantically, with a race of mythic warrior women, whose name supposedly derives from the Greek for 'without a breast', to describe the sacrifice they were prepared to make in order to wield the bow more efficiently.
