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An anthology provoked by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring

Edited by John Burnside and Maurice Riordan
Preface by Jonathan Bate

Published by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Price: £7.50 | Paperback | 256pp | ISBN: 1 903080 00 2

Publication Date: 29 April 2004

Poetry Book Society Special Commendation

With new poems from Simon Armitage, John Burnside, Mark Doty, Paul Farley, Allison Funk, Linda Gregerson, Seamus Heaney, James Lasdun, Andrew Motion, Paul Muldoon, Eiléan Ní­ Chuilleanáin, Deryn Rees-Jones, Christopher Reid, Maurice Riordan, Robin Robertson, Michael Symmons Roberts, Robert Wrigley.

Published in time for spring, Wild Reckoning is an anthology inspired by the fortieth anniversary of Rachel Carson’s controversial and prophetic book Silent Spring, which warned against the indiscriminate use of pesticides and of the consequences for the environment.

To celebrate the anniversary and to encourage dialogue between writers and scientists who share a common interest in the natural world, the Gulbenkian Foundation commissioned leading poets – including Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion and Mark Doty – to work with key scientists such as the palaeontologist Richard Fortey and John Sulston, mapper of the human genome.

‘In the twentieth century, it had become customary to say that scientists had no social role… just as a generation of poets came to believe that “poetry makes nothing happen”. Carson challenged both these assumptions,’ say the editors, John Burnside and Maurice Riordan.

Wild Reckoning features 17 new poems, which were the fruit of discussions between the poets and scientists, and brings to the fore poems, past and present, which express a concern for the fragility of living things.

‘We sought out poets who, it seemed to us, had something vital to say about the human relationship with the natural world in the broadest sense: poets with a philosophical concern with the land; those whose work dealt, in a clear-sighted and compassionate fashion, with animal and plant life … Alongside their work, we have set poems that seem to us to represent our great tradition of nature poetry at its most imaginative and original…’

The commissioned poets responded to the scientists and the science they encountered in very different ways. Deryn Rees-Jones, whose collaboration with Richard Fortey included asking him to write a stream of consciousness email using only words associated with a trilobite, says: ‘Richard Fortey’s enthusiasm, his ability to write like a poet whilst thinking like a scientist, left me wanting to know more about these small creatures.’

Christopher Reid, who worked with earth scientist Bernard Wood, admits his poem ‘is the product of ignorance, or easily defeated intelligence … I found myself repeatedly running up against mathematical formulae beyond my grasp. I then began to wonder if creation myths and proper scientific knowledge could speak to each other in any profitable way.’

How can poetry grapple ‘profitably’ with science and the issues it raises? Michael Symmons Roberts tackles the science head on: ‘“To John Donne" came out of a series of conversations with Sir John Sulston, head of the team that mapped the genome at the Sanger Centre in Cambridge. That conversation was both a privilege and an inspiration, since John – as father of the map – is passionately concerned that his work should not be abused. In particular, he has grave concerns – as do I – about genetic patenting …Taking its bearings from “To His Mistress Going To Bed”, the poem is about the mapping and ownership of the body.’

In other poems, the relationship with the science is more tangential. Simon Armitage, who collaborated with the ornithologist Peter Bennett, says: ‘I was thinking of what is known in economic geography as “The tragedy of the commons”. Rich farmland is plundered until it is utterly exhausted. In the poem, the reapers take part in an ancient fertility ceremony, but out of the last few grains flies a Spix’s Macaw. Can there be a more potent omen of the dying planet than this bird, whose world population is reckoned to be just one?’

‘We cannot take the eternity of nature for granted,’ says Jonathan Bate. ‘In Silent Spring Rachel Carson asked us to imagine a world without birdsong. Such, she feared, was the world being made by pesticides. It is testimony to the prophetic power of her book that it should have inspired some remarkable new poetry in this one, whilst also casting new light back on a rich array of older poetry.’

Further information and review copies from: Felicity Luard or Louisa Hooper
Tel: 020 7908 7604, Fax: 020 7908 7580
E-mail: info@gulbenkian.org.uk

Wild Reckoning is available through booksellers in the UK or can be ordered from Central Books:
E-mail: orders@centralbooks.com
Website: www.centralbooks.co.uk

Notes to Editors

1. John Burnside has published eight books of poetry, of which the most recent is The Light Trap (Jonathan Cape, 2002). His novels include The Dumb House and Living Nowhere (Cape, 1996 and 2003). He teaches creative writing and a course in literature and ecology at the University of St Andrews.

2. Maurice Riordan has published two collections of poetry, A Word from the Loki and Floods (Faber and Faber, 1995 and 2000). He is the editor, with Jon Turney, of A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science (Faber, 2000) and teaches creative writing at Imperial College London.

3. Jonathan Bate is Leverhulme Research Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick, specialising in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, Romanticism and Eco Criticism. His most recent books are The Song of the Earth and John Clare: A Biography (Picador, 2000 and 2003).

4. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation is well known for its pioneering work in the field of art and science and its seminal publications in this area. Strange and Charmed: Science and the contemporary visual arts (2000) has inspired numerous adventurous research collaborations and residencies in both science and arts organisations. Science, not Art: Ten scientists’ diaries (2003) was BBC Radio 4 ‘Book of the Week’ in February 2004.

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