In this time when the effects of climate change intensify worldwide, the value of an effective eco-poetics scales correspondingly. The challenge inherent to the task is to discover ways to make the long-practised endeavour sufficiently fresh. Nicholas Bradley set himself this exact challenge in his debut poetry collection Rain Shadow.
Bradley makes a strong impression when he uses his experience mountain climbing to offer a different perspective on landscape. His poem “Glacial Suite” is a four-page meditation on one such climb, built on terse lines that break precisely to urge the reader forward:
A crevasse is a cradle
of nothing. It collects
slender air and rocks
it into deep, slanted
silence. Nothing, woken,
crawls over the lip
to the icefield... (6)
The poem continues to build as the climber ascends, with each new meditation set apart from the last by several extra lines, giving the new turn on the topic space to breathe physically, while the lines themselves remain short and taut. The last stanza then circles back to the first like a koan:
The time turned to strata
in ancient miles of ice
is waiting. The lingering
cold is patience
exhaling. In the bed
of the crevasse all
is in repose. The crevasse
cradles nothing.
The poem is a metaphorical exploration of life through our interaction with the rock, ice, and the emptiness of the crevasse.
