Book Club: Eichler's startlingly fresh approach to nature poetry and ecopoetry

With Eichler's startlingly fresh approach to nature poetry and ecopoetry, the reader is invited to come close and experience islands and wild places in Scandinavia, Iceland, Russia, Alaska and Scotland, where ‘we are found: / the gannets are white flares / hitting the water / under a fishbone sky’. Her poems of landscape and sea blur the relationship between human and animal, body and place. The book moves from the small certainties of childhood towards the profound uncertainties of adulthood.

Many of the poems are written from thresholds, with the speaker trying to divine the future and failing. Islands are a linking theme throughout the book, where the speakers explore vulnerable, isolated places, as well as ideas around choice.

Here are poems about being trapped within systems of gendered expectations so all-encompassing they are difficult to see. Elsewhere are poems about the world falling apart while we get used to living in a state of emergency, normalising extremes in order to survive. Other poems explore gendered violence, spectacle and privacy, and ambivalence about marriage and children.

Born in Hertfordshire, Charlotte Eichler is a scholar of Old Norse and Viking literature, working at the University of Leeds. Her work was featured in Carcanet’s New Poetries VIII (2021) and in the pamphlet Their Lunar Language (published by Scarborough's Valley Press), which Anthony Vahni Capildeo characterised as 'modern pastoral, not nostalgic, and well beyond the ordinary domestic lyric'. Swimming Between Islands gathers this work with a substantial collection of new poems into a debut collection, and is published by Manchester's Carcanet Press.

The Sheffield Telegraph publishes here an excerpt of the collection. The collection can be ordered from your local library or from your local Sheffield bookshops, including the independents Rhyme and Reason, La Biblioteka and Juno Books.

Poems from Swimming Between Islands

AUTUMN AT THE WIREWORKS

It’s spring again

but inside out,

the woods piratical,

bejewelled with pick-me reds,

gem-studded puffballs,

funnels of unlikely blue.

There are teaspoons

of jelly, dead men’s fingers,

brains that glow.

Here we are unburied –

we lug our spirits

and our winter fears

in backpacks until we find

the waterfalls and whisky pools,

the woods’ distillery

with copper guts

and leaf clot underfoot.

BALLOONIST

Haworth Gala, 1906

She is wet to the waist

in river, a minnow girl

slipping through lanes,

always looking

for the ropes

somebody hangs

in the woods

near water,

or that feeling you get

at the edge of cliffs.

On the moors

the walls lose

their footing,

lurching up hills,

along scars.

She looks down on the village,

pictures it wilder –

black hats a penguin circus,

the Old White Lion

roaring her name –

all those extra hearts

to bloody her.

She chooses

the balloon’s silky bones,

a lampfish sky.

THE HERMIT OF TREIG

Eagles tilt the hills,

the loch’s skin bends

like a fish. This isn’t solid

ground – even the train tracks float

on brushwood. My legs give way

from time to time.

How nice to have an accident!

Knocked back into my body

for a spell, careful bandages.

I built a house from matchsticks

then from trees. Shed full

of cowberries drying

on the year’s old news.

I live in a cloud world, one day

behind. Snow falls,

small things get lost.

The rose I was talking to

last night has gone –

I’ll find her,

chop the wood

before the ice

comes back. It’s pretty,

what I’m seeing –

zigzags every colour

you can think of.

MOUSA, SHETLAND

Airy flies cloud round our feet

from rotting seaweed, black

with a salt wrack smell.

Petrels flit from a Pictish broch

as we climb the steps at dawn.

We are found:

the gannets are white flares

hitting the water

under a fishbone sky.

HERVÖR AND VÖLUND

I held the birds of myself together

for seven years.

When I left with his ring,

he made seven hundred

to tempt me back.

Offered earrings like green eyes,

brooches of milk teeth,

silver cups like small skulls.

I put our sky-blue eggs

beyond his reach,

up where distance

softened everything to feathers.

I loved his hands,

their blacksmith skill.

He loved black velvet bark

after a fire.

But it wasn’t only metal he could shape.

Now he’s far above me,

a vulture with black fingers

and a blood-drop head.

Our children’s veins were green-lit –

young trees

with the smell of smoke

already in their branches.