Poetry Review, 1: Awakening by Sam Love

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

 Sam Love, Awakening: Musings on Planetary Survival, New Mills, Derbyshire: Fly on the Wall Press, 2020 (£6.99, paperback, ISBN: 978-1-913211-06-6)

Reviewer: Rodanthi Tzanelli

The review will appear in TPQ

There is something sublime when reading about disappearing rainforests and a diagnosis of the onset of a Spermageddon in Sam Love’s latest volume, Awakening: Musings on Planetary Survival. The tone of the poems is orchestrated around notions of an impending loss of ecosystemic balance on a planetary scale, and yet, readers often find themselves smiling at his controlled humour or horrified at the absurdity of human behaviour. Structured into four parts (“Awakening”, “Origins”, “Impacts” and “Recovering Hope”), the collection retains the arc of an ecological drama in which humanity is both the agent of disaster and its ultimate victim. There is no doubt that Love thinks of this escalation into nothingness in more positive terms than the catastrophists of climate change: the book ends with a low-key note on our agency in small acts of kindness toward nature, such as planting a tree, letting it flourish and watching squirrels “weave their nests” in its branches. However, between the conclusion and the grim opening of the book, in which someone reflects on the gallons of water they use to relax in a jacuzzi (“as much … as a rural African / villager uses in ten days”), we are taken on a rather unpleasant trip into the Anthropocene.

Like most of Love’s previously published poetry, this chapbook reflects his interest in questions of energy and the environment. His creative thinking blends tropes of realism and surrealism, always with a large dose of humour:

“If aliens wanted to destroy rival humanoids,

what better way than to dangle

a synthetic material so enticing,

we couldn’t resist the lure

of a plastic covered Earth?” 

His style is openly pedagogical (he has a jargon-free “module” that he wants to teach us) and teleological (it will be about the end of life, if we are not very good students), but also intentionally erratic (here very serious, there bordering on the strange), so that he unsettles us. “If bacteria could do a belly laugh”, he asks, “they’d be doubling over, because the real joke is on us: humans who think we rule the earth”. Such Shakespearean prognostications on our demise teach humility and occasionally aim to induce guilt: for stylising our kitchen surfaces with ancient trees that natives respected as their source of sustenance for centuries, when we display them now as tokens of conspicuous consumption until they begin to develop cracks; for honouring our beloved dead by placing on their grave “nearly-natural synthetic flowers”, because they can “keep standing up, when you lay your loved one down”; or not collecting rogue plastic bags from the streets but letting them join during downpours other plastic detritus “destined to become the legacy of our so-called civilization”.

There is a strong contemplative feel in this collection, which I associate - in my vocation as a scholar and my own work as a writer of poetry - with pilgrimage. There is no religious association in his poetry, but only a desire to restore harmony both materially and emotionally in our world. Love asks us to light a candle for Mother Earth and “imagine [our] contribution to healing the planet”, but the call is not a New Age ritual. The hard facts of pollution, neglect and overconsumption that he lays out in his work are very difficult to stomach, and even more difficult to challenge at the level of practice in a world bound by capitalist mobilities and corruption. However, his ode to the ways the histories of human hubris and nature’s retaliation against our excesses are inextricably intertwined is worth reading for the clarity of its message and beautiful form.