This week we present a short film exploring the watery landscape of Dartmoor, scripted and narrated by Clearing editor Ben Smith, filmed by his brother Max Smith and produced by FatSand films.

Here, Max and Ben explain a little about the inspiration and thinking behind the project: 

“In the U.K. we often regard moorland landscapes, such as the Highlands of Scotland, The Lake District and Dartmoor, as symbols of wilderness. However, these places have been farmed, mined and inhabited by people for millennia, and have felt the presence of humans longer than many of our urban centres.

The ecologist Frank Fraser Darling coined the phrase “wet desert” to describe the landscape of Dartmoor, such was the lack of biodiversity that he found there. But in hidden corners of the moor, relics of its past cling on – stands of trees coated in moss and fern, supporting a range of plant and animal life – relics that point to the bizarre fact that when humans first arrived here, these open landscapes were temperate rainforests.”

Max Smith is a freelance filmmaker and motion graphic designer based in Brighton. Since Graduating in Graphic Design & Visual Communication from the University of Brighton in 2012, he has worked as a Motion Designer, Camera Operator, Camera Assistant and Editor on a range of projects for clients including the BBC, Discovery Channel, Canal+ & London Fashion Week. He was shortlisted for a British Wildlife Photography Award in the Wildlife in HD Video Category in 2014 for his film A Sense of Place.

Ben Smith is on the editorial team of The Clearing and is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Plymouth University. His first chapbook of poems, Sky Burials, is published by Worple Press. He lives in North Cornwall.

The Longhouse

Backlit by a flickering hearth

each room is a stage

applauding its audience.

Silence twines speech

into smoke-threads

the talk of wool and milk

twin whitenesses spinning

days into decades. Time

passes like a finger sliding

along a grained surface.

A pony returns riderless

snow coming down

warm bread in the panniers.

Everything unchanged

for a few more moments

the time it takes for the

snowflakes to fill footprints

coals to cool in the grate

oak beams to soften

leaving the roof nothing

for support but the attic’s dust

the house’s adumbrations.

Golden Plovers

He does not know the names

of the trees hooked into the sky

but their twisted forms are familiar

drawn by gales on the days that didn’t arrive

burned up in their own sunrise like golden plovers.

Now just the weightlessness of things

walls tumbled, the livestock all gone,

leaving only the torn edges of the fields

his square mile a sail ripped from its mast

left to billow overhead like golden plovers.

As he passes the twmp’s open mouth

he tries to answer his fathers’ questions,

tell them of seas beyond the whalebacks.

But, like them, he knows only long winters

and life concealed like golden plovers.

What remains as he is washed away

are the long days where he disappeared,

flowed out into the hill with the bracken roots,

his hours still there, waiting for the last light

to catch, when they’ll glow like golden plovers.

Across the Sound

Here is a gathering of those things

that constitute seabirds

the pipes, reeds, frets and strings,

and the notes produced – all westerlies.

From the cliffs you can hear spaces

in their music, narrow and infinite,

silences that draw voices in tides.

Now the white notes are blown

from the page, they wheel endlessly

suspended above this egressing sea.

And where next?

To the places not in need of names,

the blue isles merging into others,

adrift on a gyre, dragged by rivers

that flow from pole to pole.

Like us, once out of site

of the overwintered world,

they will dive into the dark

and feed.

James Roberts lives in the Black Mountains. He co-edits Zoomorphic magazine. Recent poetry has been published by Agenda and Cinnamon Press. A novella “The Man in the Mountain.” was published in 2015.

These four poems are from the clearing a forthcoming pamphlet written by LukeThompson, illustrated by Mairead Dunne and published by Atlantic Press. The pamphlet will be released May 2016. To see how to pre-order a copy, or to donate to the crowd funding campaign, please visit here.

In 2016, as well as the clearing, Luke will be publishing Clay Phoenix, his biography of the poet Jack Clemo on Ally Press, and a collection of illustrated flash fiction with John Kilburn. He is currently working on a non-fiction piece for Little Toller Books and is a founding editor of The Clearing magazine.

Mairead has exhibited her work internationally, as well as throughout the UK and Ireland. She received an MFA from the University of Ulster, Belfast, where she became co-director of the artist-run collective Platform Arts. Mairead has held a number of international residencies, including in Ireland, France, Cyprus and Beijing, and she is currently enrolled on the MA Illustration: Authorial Practice programme in Falmouth.

The Hare in the Snow

My eyes adjust to a sky

as blank as a headache, a landscape

of snow-cloud florescence.

I walk across covered ploughed fields,

down delicate blackthorn hedgerows,

when a few feet away a furrow breaks for cover –

it runs

it runs and runs

and runs

bounding over whiteness, shedding whiteness

and where it lay, a crucible of melt

retains its white-hot heartbeat.

Barn Owl

My cave drip footsteps fill the barn

before I sense the silent sound

of wing in darkness –

a carpet beat out of my dimension,

sent from the vacuum of space,

a pure white blade

of soft steel – I see a feathered baby

face. With torchlight I follow

its flight path

as it traces a scythe on the night sheet

and is posted through a hole

in the velvet.

The Falconer

One day, he asked me would I like to

handle the hawk? I declined the offer.

How could the bones of the creature weigh

only as much as air? Its talons tightened

onto his stove gloved hand.

But the talent of hawks was lured by his wrist.

He’d release his Harris to the heavens

and watch it disappear – we’d turn our heads

and try to predict the stretch of skyline

from which it would return.

BRAKE LIGHTS
by Holly Corfield-Carr 

OOOOoOOOOAs she takes the corner into Cannock Chase,
she sees a red moon wobbling over conifer,
OOOOOOOOOnervous retinal scan of the night’s blind eye
turning against the wood as she turns here,

OOOOOoopropels through high beam like a comet reversed
and lancing the dark, like the moth’s green meteor
OOooover the windscreen, like the neon tubing of deer eyes
at the roadside, the fast pelt into fern as she passes,

OOOOOsitting in her own pocket, continually turning itself
inside out onto tarmac in a trail of oil and hot air,
OOOOOstill cut with all her mis-sung lines and fart and half
of all her uplit conversations.

OOOOoOOShe bowls downhill. The red tops of the conifers
wince shut the bloodshot moon and the whole
OOOOOoOOOOObrutal fuss of the forest is gone. She sings
her heart out. Closes her eyes. Drives.

OOOOOOOOooOAhead and from behind the dark tarpaulin,
the deer toes the edge of the road, bright strip
OOOOOooOof heat, stands to shake the night from her back,
listening to the overlapping lunacy of the birds

OOOOOoooowhen the light skewers her. And she holds her
face in the half cup of her hands on the wheel,
OOOooOOOthe brace of her reflection over her animal face,
a sudden, illegible selenelion —

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooOwhich is two bodies reminding
OOOOOOOOOOOOOeach other they are bodies
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooOOin time

PROPITHECUS CANDIDUS, 1871

by Polly Atkin

When your spirit returns its shape is revealed
by a fuzzed white halo – iron filings
in negative – tracing your moving field
through the trees. Your face is concealed, only
your eyes and voice blare out. Night
gloves your fingers, muffles the putt
of your landing, soft, outside their door.
Sleeping, they are not frightened of you.
They do not know you, or what you will mean.
Your seven songs.
OOOOOOOOYour hushed leap.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOYour ancestors’ journey.
You have none of the cunning of my species, silken
demon. You never learn to attack
or run. You watch through lenses of dim
fire like the embers of forests, mark
your place and are gone. As quick as a continent
shuffles north, as an ocean gyre
shifts to reverse.
0000000000From an unknown height
you howl the lament of the restless dead.
Your strange trajectory.
OOOOOOOYour sweepstake hypothesis.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOYour solitary territory.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOYour dynamo hum.

Holly Corfield Carr is based in Bristol and Cambridge where she is working on a PhD in site-specific writing. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and the Frieze Writer’s Prize in 2015. Her pamphlet MINE, documenting a series of performances in an eighteenth-century crystal grotto, was published by Spike Island in 2014.

Polly Atkin’s second poetry pamphlet Shadow Dispatches (Bridgend: Seren, 2013) won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize, 2012, and was shortlisted for the Lakeland Book of the Year, 2014. In June 2014 she was awarded New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse Prize, for work in progress which ‘reflects a strong sense of place or the natural environment’. Her poem ‘A short history of the moon’ won the 2014 Wigtown Poetry Prize. She lectures in English Studies at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow). She is currently completing her first full collection of poetry, and a monograph exploring the connections between Romantic legacies, contemporary creativity, ecopoetics, tourism and place. 

- Peter Larkin

Eyes on Open Leaves

Peter Larkin’s publications include Terrain Seed Scarcity (2001) and Leaves of Field (2006). His latest collection, Give Forest Its Next Portent, came out last year with Shearsman Books.

Melissa Harrison’s new novel At Hawthorn Time is out now, published by Bloomsbury. Her first novel, Clay (Bloomsbury, 2013), won the Portsmouth First Fiction award, was selected for Amazon’s ‘Rising Stars’ programme and chosen by Ali Smith as a Book of the Year. Ben Smith speaks to her about her recent shift in focus from the city to the country, as well as the role of walking, photography and politics in her work.

Your first novel, Clay, has been described as an ‘urban pastoral’, and your new novel, At Hawthorn Time, has been called a ‘modern pastoral’. What does the term ‘pastoral’ mean to you?

It’s interesting that the term has been used about both my books; it seems to indicate a need to fix them in a tradition; to say, here is a new practitioner of a certain form. Clay was also called a ‘nature novel’ (in The Guardian, I think). The qualifier seems to suggest that there is some difficulty about how to define them.

Since writing both books I’ve come to see that perhaps they’re unconventional because they don’t focus on exclusively human concerns. When you make the world of a novel larger, by including non-human lives and concerns, it risks making the people in it seem slightly smaller. I don’t mind that; I think that given all our depredations we’re long overdue a bit of a demotion – and moreover, I find the world beyond humans almost unimaginably rich and interesting. A big factor in my enjoyment of nature is the refreshing feeling that I am part of a large cast of creatures, rather than always in the lead role.

Fiction can certainly be a powerful tool for changing perspectives, and I think it’s healthy to question the anthropocentrism that has led us where we are. But I didn’t write either book with any conscious intention to add to a tradition, either of pastoral, or the broad genre – if it is one – called ‘nature writing’. In fact, I’ve learned that for me it’s important not to try to force a work into any particular form or genre, despite how much I want to. The more I try to control what I write, the less successful it is – which is deeply chastening, and at times painful for someone like me: a planner and list-maker by nature. Writing is, I have found, a process of learning to sit with the discomfort of not knowing what I am producing, or whether it will be any good, and keep going anyway.

Is your writing process affected by the particular landscape that you are writing about? What were the differences between writing about the urban landscapes of Clay and the farms, fields and villages of At Hawthorn Time?

There was no difference in process for me. Both books are about landscapes I know well, though when I was writing Clay I was living in the place I was inspired by and seeing it daily, whereas writing At Hawthorn Time meant drawing more on memory – although I did visit the village on which I based Lodeshill several times during those two years.

As well as place, at the start of a project one of the most important decisions I have to make is what time of year it is set; I’m not sure I could write anything, no matter how short, without knowing the season as it affects so fundamentally the landscape, the botany, the birdsong ­– the entire world in which the piece will take place. It can be harder to write about a season I’m not in than about a place I’m not in, so sometimes that affects my decision; with Clay, which takes place over the course of a year, I drew on detailed daily notes I had made about what the natural world around me was doing through the seasons. At Hawthorn Time takes place in one spring month, which meant making notes during that time of year, and taking photographs, so I could draw on them even in midwinter. I went on a four-day walk up the A5 as research for Jack’s pilgrimage and waited until April to do it; afterwards, I revisited the sections about his walk to bring in everything I had learned.

So, is it important for you to spend time in the landscapes you are writing about?

I’d find it challenging to write about a landscape I didn’t know intimately, I think. It’s not just the worry that I’d get something wrong; far more importantly, I wouldn’t feel the pull of it, the thisness of it. I need to care about a place, I need to be able to draw on my feeling for it for all those long hours at my desk. Facts aren’t enough.

The one location in At Hawthorn Time I didn’t know well was the places just north of London that Jack passes through on his trek north – which is why I did the solo walk I’ve just mentioned. I’ve already written about this walk here and here so I’m loath to repeat myself and bore your readers, but suffice to say that while it didn’t turn out as I expected, it was really valuable to get out and engage with that part of the country, despite (or perhaps because of) how hard it was to walk in, and how psychologically challenging the trip was.

Both your novels deal with the ways in which different places affect people’s psychologies. Is this something that you’ve experienced yourself?

Human psychology is such a huge subject that I’m not sure I know how to answer! Our state of mind is informed by so many things, from the kinds of attachments we were able to form as children, to our education, our health, our beliefs, our life circumstances, our stress levels… because of that, I think it would be facile to suggest that particular landscapes affect our psychological make-up in any kind of general way; there are just too many variables. Some people get a great deal of joy out of living somewhere rural; others, like Howard, will barely notice it, or may even find the countryside oppressive and instead flourish in towns. And of course the effects of place on each of us may change with time, too.

It’s my belief that having a regular, positive experience of the natural world can benefit most of us, both physically and mentally, but that can be achieved in all sorts of landscapes – including cities.

In the character of Jack, you present us with someone who has chosen a life on foot. How important is walking for you (as an individual and as a writer)? Does it influence your writing process? Do you carry a notebook when you go out walking?

Walking is enormously important to me, whether it’s taking my dog out before bed each night, climbing Helvellyn or hiking on Dartmoor with my husband, or going out alone to hear nightingales or watch the dawn rise. You can’t connect with the countryside from a car or through books; you have to get out there and put your body, your physical self, into it. Walking is a kind of thinking; it’s also a way of connecting with the past, of establishing a sense of continuity with the generations of people who have left their mark on places using their feet, their hands and their imaginations.

This year I was invited to speak at the Hay Festival, and straight after my event my husband, my dog Scout and I headed into the Black Mountains, parked at the first interesting-looking footpath sign we saw, and set out. As well as the lovely little whitewashed chapel at Capel-y-ffin – which reminded Frances Kilvert of an owl – we discovered a ruined, roofless farmstead inhabited only by sheep and entirely inaccessible by road, only a mud-thick holloway, long lost and overarched by trees, leading down from it to a ford. Places like that, redolent with history, are the reward of the walker – not to mention the birdsong, the smell of cow parsley, and the warmth of the sun on your face.

I don’t carry a notebook when I’m walking, no; I give myself up to the walk and to the moment, and try to drink in everything I can with all my senses. Some of it will be lost, but I don’t think that matters: it all counts in the end, consciously or unconsciously. I do take photos, sometimes with my DSLR but often just with my iPhone, although I use these more as prompts than accurate records. The discipline of photography teaches you how to look, and was a big part of learning how to be a writer for me.

That’s an interesting connection. Could you say a little more about how photography ties in with your writing process? Why do you find photographs more useful prompts than written notes? Are there particular photographers who have influenced the way you see (and write)?

I do make written notes about the natural world, and I note down ideas and scraps of dialogue all the time – but I don’t take a notebook with me on walks. I find it interrupts the process of the walk and the natural development of my thoughts too much, whereas snapping a photo makes barely a ripple in the flow of the journey.

It’s worth distinguishing here between iPhone snaps, which I use as prompts for memory, and the ‘proper’ photography I do with my DSLR which is something separate and an end in itself. I’m self-taught and under no illusions about how basic my skills are compared to professional photographers, but even so the process of learning to use a camera fed into my writing in two ways. The first was that, while I really wanted to do it, it didn’t matter to me half as much as writing did – which meant that there was much more ‘play’ to it. It wasn’t achingly serious, it was fun – albeit challenging fun – and I felt OK about making mistakes because it wasn’t as though my whole identity hinged on it. Having a second stream of creativity that had a totally different feel to it freed up my writing to be more playful and take more risks, I think.

The second way it contributed was the process of learning to see. Photography forces you to slow down and frame and think in a different way; and while having a compact or an iPhone to snap with is fantastic, it was the big camera with its difficult settings that really made me engage with light and shade and form and composition. I look back at my early photographs now and it’s not just as though I couldn’t use the camera properly, it’s as though I couldn’t see. That’s been really valuable.

Having said all that, there’s a lot of technically accomplished landscape and nature photography out there that leaves me utterly cold. A rocky stream on a long exposure, or a shoreline sunset with a violet filter, a moody, black and white shot of some pylons… that kind of stuff may be popular on photography websites but it usually has no feeling to it, no guiding aesthetic other than competent use of the camera’s settings. I have no time for that. Give me Tacita Dean’s dreamlike landscapes or Jane Bown’s affecting rural reportage any day.

One of the major debates running through At Hawthorn Time is the issue of what constitutes ‘real’ nature. One of the main characters, Kitty, stops painting bluebells and starts painting plastic bottles and electricity pylons. Do you agree with Kitty that this subject matter is more ‘real’? Or could her new paintings, perhaps, also be accused of a kind of romanticism?

Is romanticism necessarily a bad thing? I’m not sure. There are many different ways of thinking about the countryside, and I’m more interested in exploring them all, and looking at how they interact, than saying that one is more valid, or ‘real’, than another. To the wealthy city-dweller the countryside may be an idyll, all Agas and bunting and heritage chickens; to the farmer, a workplace in which productivity trumps aesthetics. To the psychogeographer it might be an unpeopled, liminal palimpsest ripe for decoding; to the ecologist a patchwork of biodiversity habitats. What’s interesting to me is that all of these things are true at the same time; it’s why I tend to write books with multiple viewpoints, including the non-human. I’m guessing that’s what Ali Smith meant when she said I had a “communal style”.

Kitty’s halting progress in the book is to do with letting go of the broad-brush, picture-postcard dream of the countryside she had when she lived in a city, and starting to notice what is actually around her – which isn’t always bucolic or pretty, but has its own value, and is worth bearing witness to. In doing so, she finds a way to come into her own, authentic relationship with place.

There is a moment in the novel where we suddenly get a glimpse of the effects of ash die-back. How important is it, for you, that contemporary fiction addresses these kinds of large-scale environmental and political issues?

I can only speak from my own experience; I don’t believe it’s anyone’s place to set out an agenda for other writers. Choosing to make art of any kind is tough, and requires real commitment: the results are a gift to the world, freely given. I don’t think any writer has a duty to write in a particular way.

When it comes to fiction, all writers have different concerns. Some want to change the world; some want to be successful; some want to tell a good story. I’m glad of every new voice, whether it addresses environmental concerns or not, because I believe that storytelling itself is so important in developing empathy and imagination: vital tools in living well and responsibly. Stories, I believe, are central to our ability to be good humans.

For me, it’s hard to keep my fears and hopes about the natural world out of my novels because they permeate my life; my books represent what the world looks and feels like to me. Admittedly, there is an evangelism about what I write – although I hope I don’t proselytise. It’s my experience that while some people are ready to engage with the big issues around the environment, many are turned off by issue-based narratives and campaigning literature, and it’s those people who I hope I may reach: with emotional engagement, rather than paralysing guilt. That doesn’t mean I think this approach is better than anyone else’s; the fact is, we need all sorts of voices doing all sorts of work if we are to reconnect people with the natural world. There is no single, right way of going about it.

It seems to me that hope – both for us and for our fellow species – lies in our ability to rediscover a pleasurable, deeply felt connection to nature and place, and I believe that storytelling (and, of course, getting out and walking) is a powerful tool for doing just that.

You can find out more about Melissa Harrison at www.melissaharrison.co.uk A 10” record featuring two tracks inspired by At Hawthorn Time, with an individually silk-screened and hand-stitched sleeve by artist Lucie Murtagh, is available now from www.caughtbytheriver.net.

These collections explore many of the themes at the heart of The Clearing: ecology and folklore, the complex relationships between people, plants and animals, and the links between language and landscape, the domestic and the wild.

THE CRAB

by Isabel Galleymore

Sunbathing on basalt,

the crab is a miniature

cedarwood stage

moving upon pincers

and ginger-haired legs –

empty of actors,

this stage casually

bears a backdrop;

a skywash of sea,

a suggestion of birds,

how its scale frames

an old local story

with these barnacles

empty, ashen

as blown volcanoes.

ST. PETER AND THE STORM PETRELS

by  Ben Smith

Footsteps on water.

Dawn clear as prayer.

Bodies hanging over water

like small, dark beads.

How long have they been out there

treading slowly across the bay,

staring down into the salt-clear distances,

scrying for storms?

There was a time when a saint walked on water.

We saw him – a bright light crossing the bay

leaving a trail of taut, still water

marked with footprints.

He left long ago, turning west

on his weightless march,

leaning into the heft of the waves

like a restless ship.

We still wait for him to return,

but perhaps, lost or driven mad

by such winds, such distances,

this is what he has become –

a petrel hanging over water,

staring down as if in wonder

and pattering its ragged dance

to the distant, scudding footfall of storms.

HOLY WELL

by Isabel Galleymore

Legend tells that the well contained 3 fish,
and as long as St Neot ate no more than one
fish a day their number would never decrease.

Those seeking health, those whose
cells do not divide quickly enough,
visit this small installation of blessed
multiplications an angel once promised
– two fish will be three fish by the next
day, and always, as long as you only eat
one. There are no fish now – but where
there’s water there’s a whether of matter
– see how the coins someone’s placed in
the ripple are becoming uncertain of their
solid circles, copying their colour onto
the granite floor until this well fills with
thoughts of halos.

DERANGEMENTS OF SCALE

by Ben Smith

‘Environmental slogans follow horrifying predictions of climate chaos with injunctions, no less solemn, not to leave electrical appliances on standby or overfill the kettle. Such language enacts a bizarre derangement of scales, collapsing the trivial and the catastrophic into each other’

                                                                –   Timothy Clark

I boil the kettle and the crow is back at the window.

This has happened before. Maybe it has always happened.

I used to know a thing about birds – something

about feeding habits, something about patterns of flight –

but from here this crow looks the size of a tower block.

He walks the length of the horizon, staring at himself in the glass.

I boil the kettle and a tower block falls. It’s okay,

I knew that this would happen. There were signs

in the newspapers and pasted to lamp-posts.

But I didn’t know that the sky would fill with dust;

that the roof-tops, the window, the crow,

would all turn white with dust. I do not know

why the crow is collecting coat hangers, tangles of wire.

I boil the kettle and the TV loses itself in a storm. There is no news,

but if I listen at the wall I can hear talk of the weather –

that it will get much hotter, that it will get much colder.

I still have power, but across the street, lights disappear,

as if the crow is stretching his wings.

At night, the kettle switches on. I wake

to the sound of flood waters, of foundations murmuring.

I turn over. At least I don’t need to worry about the kettle any more.

Through the wall, in the kitchen and in kitchens across the city,

water pools in rows of untouched cups

and crows rise like heavy clouds of steam

lugging themselves towards open windows.

BERRIES

by Jos Smith

We were looking for your best side,

a single photograph that captured HAWTHORN

an image that said CLIFFTOP ENDURANCE

or showed on a calm blue day

the loose direction of a decade’s wind.

What we found were these berries

the colour of dried blood

– here take them, have them, they are yours, anyone’s –

while the spirit of the tree passed out below,

sifting back down through the earth.

Whose black skeleton is this left here then?

Whose troubled silhouette,

home from home for Sweeney working his claws?

Who will remember these blackening berries

as the blind Atlantic wind swallows them whole?

ASH

by Jeremy Over

It seems to hang lifelessly now in midsummer leaf

but here comes the wind moving through the fields of barley

like a pack of hounds on the trail of a day

when the same tree was loud

with an anxiety of winter thrushes

which, as I approached, made it breathe in

and then just let go, giving everything up:

the full deck of cards spread out, hand over hand.

THE GREEN MAN

by Ben Smith

Now I appear in beams,

now in door-frames, the edges

of bookcases and chairs.

I don’t know why I am inside,

in drawers, in wardrobes,

in floorboards’ warped whorls.

Nothing but flat surfaces,

no boles or branches.

And varnish, Christ! My face

compressed, contorted,

eyes sealed open and nothing to do

but stare at ceilings,

willing the wood to grow.

Nothing to look forward to but the sun

drying my mouth into a crooked grin.

Time is sanded down, one day

into another. I split

through paint on window sills;

splinters bloom, while outside

the first leaves unfurl.

Somewhere, the first leaves unfurl.

Jeremy Over lives and works in Cockermouth, Cumbria. He has had poems published in various magazines and anthologies and in 2002 won the BBC wildlife poetry competition. His two collections are ‘A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese’ (Carcanet 2001) and ‘Deceiving Wild Creatures’ (Carcanet 2009).

Jos Smith is a freelance researcher, writer and poet currently working on a history of the arts and environmental charity Common Ground (funded by the British Academy). He lives in north Dorset.

Ben Smith has recently completed a PhD in Environmental Poetics at Exeter University. He now works as a freelance editor and occasional lecturer. His poetry, criticism and short fiction have appeared in various journals, magazines and anthologies. His first pamphlet of poetry will be published by Worple Press in 2014. He is currently working on a poetry collection about wolves. He blogs at wolves-etc.blogspot.co.uk.

DROUGHT

Where last night I walked alone,

past the field to the parking lot –

the silent field, at the end

of the driest winter on record –

tonight, in this light rain,

a frog’s

loud, persistent, guttural:

urge, urge, urge.

STILL LIFE

After a day of catching up

on families and dreams and jobs,

we say goodbye

on the windy porch,

next to muddy shoes,

a plastic shopping bag,

upright and open,

wind tugging the flapping handles,

grounded by its load

of lemons, handfuls of yellow

fruit. Here, you say,

the tree gave much this year.

Deborah Fass was born and raised in Southern California, moved to Japan with a Japanese Ministry of Education Research Fellowship, and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches English as a Second Language. Deborah has a Master of Arts degree and is currently a Master of Fine Arts candidate. Deborah’s work has appeared in literary journals including New Directions and Hummingbird.