Description
What is still wild in us - and is it recoverable? The poems in Wilder, Jemma Borg's second collection, are acts of excavation into the deeper and more elusive aspects of our mental and physical lives. Whether revisiting Dante's forest of the suicides, experiencing the saturation of new motherhood or engaging in a boundary-dissolving encounter with a psychedelic cactus, these meticulous and sensuous poems demonstrate a restless intelligence, seeking out what we are losing and inviting us to 'break ourselves each against the beauty of the other'. They call on us to remember ourselves as the animals we are, in connection with the complex web of life in what Mary Midgley called an 'extended sympathy', and to consider wildness as a process of becoming, reforming and growth. We do not live in a time when we can afford denial. Instead, by being willing to enter despair, might we find what Gary Snyder described as 'the real world to which we belong' and recover the means to save what we are destroying?
About the Author
Jemma Borg won the inaugural Ginkgo Prize in 2018 and The Rialto/RSPB Nature and Place Competition in 2017. Recent publications include the TLS, The Poetry Review and Oxford Poetry, and anthologies such as 'Out of Time' (Valley Press 2021) and 'Places of Poetry' (Oneworld 2020), and her first collection, 'The illuminated world' (Eyewear, 2014), won the Fledgling Award and the New Writing Ventures Award for Poetry. She was a zoologist and evolutionary geneticist before working in scientific research management in the voluntary sector and in science publishing.
Reviews
'The versatility of this work bears witness to a very unusual combination of linguistic confidence and restless intelligence. Jemma Borg is no-one's kind of poet but her own and that's an extraordinary achievement.'
Susan Wicks
'Borg makes us realise the vital connection between the human and the non-human, the physical and the psychological, the visible and the eclipsed. Like the collection's title, there is wildness and magic in these poems.'
Jennifer Wong, The Poetry Review
'Borg's vision of the natural world crackles with life and beauty and, rather than bewildering us, reminds us that the open landscape offers freedom and possibility.'
John Field, The T.S. Eliot Prize
'This collection considers not just the human impact on nature, nor the static observation of nature, nor even the post-human speakers of rocks or moss, but rather combines all these voices and points of view, and more, considers something inter-relational, to imagine all these elements coalescing and in conversation within a broader, holistic space. Between the joy of its noticings and the risks of its linguistic foraging, Wilder guides us through networks connecting and reconnecting to each other like root systems - a model for thinking perhaps, towards what we are still searching for.'
SK Grout, Poetry School
'Startling poems on human life and the natural world... She [Borg] excels when analysing the natural world, from the "needlework of [ocean] currents" and the "siltstone honeycomb" of southern England to Dante's grimly "flourishing" forest of the suicides.' Jade Cuttle, The Times Literary Supplement
'Borg writes with a painter's eye of "brute, smudged earth" at Broadwater Warren, of grass "tutting/with its many wet tongues", but saves her best writing for the human species: "My son in his ancient world is swallowing dreams" is a terrific womb-with-a-view poem with the same kick as Dylan Thomas's "Before I knocked"; the poet's unborn son "coils at my navel, the pendulums/of his legs accruing bone, his soft hands/shuddering at his face". Suspend your scepticism for the earnest eight-page hallucinogenic cactus-trip that closes the book; go with her, and you might be pleasantly surprised.' Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph
'Wilder is an adventure in language combining the passionate with the forensic, the visual with the visionary... she's not afraid to project her work as a serious contribution to describing la condition humaine aimed at fullness and accuracy.' Dilys Wood, ARTEMISpoetry
'Wilder experiments with nature to find a better perspective... [it] offers open reflections on climate-anxious selfhood in sharp verse.' Jack McKenna, The Manchester Review
'Borg offers us a worldview which is profoundly more enchanted... this is a way of relating to life on earth which broadens the horizons of what nature poetry can achieve.' SZ Shao
'"Marsh Thistle" is a beautifully robust and formal piece of what critic James Wood calls "serious noticing". Who had noticed the humble marsh thistle so, before, and dared invest it with such imaginative rigour. It is a paean with something tough and daring about it.' Kathleen Jamie, RSPB/The Rialto Nature and Place Competition report, in The Rialto
Book Information
ISBN 9781800854802
Author Jemma Borg
Format Paperback
Page Count 70
Imprint Liverpool University Press
Publisher Liverpool University Press
