Beast of Bodmin - my commissioned poem for Cornwall AONB

When my seventh poetry collection, Mama Amazonica, won Simon Armitage's inaugural Laurel Prize, I received an extra gift – a commission to write a poem about my favourite Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in Britain. I knew immediately I would write about Bodmin Moor – I now live in a deep valley just beneath the south-east corner of it. Every horse-lane bordered by high Cornish hedges opens to views of tors at the gate gaps. During strict lockdown I would walk the lanes and look up at always visible Sharptor and the Cheesewring. As soon as we were allowed to venture four miles by car, Brian my husband drove us to Kilmar Tor, off the bridle path that also leads to Hawkstor and Trewartha Tor. It's a steep climb to Kilmar Tor and got us fitter as it became a regular haunt. From the top, which is the third highest point in Cornwall, we can see Brown Willy, the highest tor, far across the other side of the moor, we can see Dartmoor on the horizon the other way, and the north and south coastlines. All the fauna and flora and land formations mentioned in my poem are loved discoveries. From the stonechats, skylarks, and bog asphodels, to the ponies we saw galloping across the plateau between Bearah Tor and the secret waterhole. I did what I love to do, which is to watch the pageants, while Brian took photos. I'm thrilled that Cornwall AONB have set my poem to aerial footage of the moor, grateful thanks to them, to Fin Davis for the film, and to Bodmin Way for the narration. I now have a series of moor and beast poems. 

On Mama Amazonica winning the inaugural Laurel Prize for ecopoetry

 

Three years after Mama Amazonica was published in 2017 by Bloodaxe, it has won the inaugural Laurel Prize. This prize was created by the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage to recognise and encourage the resurgence of environmental or nature poetry, which he felt had not quite been noticed. It is run by the Poetry School and the judges were Robert Macfarlane, Moniza Alvi, and Simon Armitage. The first prize of £5,000 is donated by Simon and is his annual laureate honorarium from the Queen. Karen McCarthy Woolf was awarded second prize for her wondrous and experimental Seasonal Disturbances, on the theme of climate change, and Colin Simms was awarded third prize for Hen Harrier, a book that focuses on one precious species. There was an extra prize for the most promising debut and this was given to Matt Howard for Gall. The inaugural prize was for the best ecopoetry collection published in the last five years, and will follow with yearly selections now.

Mama Amazonica fuses two themes: my mother's abuse by my father, and consequent mental illness, and the abused and besieged Amazon rainforest. It's a book that took me 65 years to write, and in it I managed to change my relationship with my late, estranged mother, to one of empathy and compassion, and most of all – to one of love. I did this by placing her hospital bed, not in the psychiatric ward, but inside pristine primary deep jungle, where life is at fever pitch – the psychotic human mother superimposed on Mama Amazonica, our earth mother, who is abused and exploited by humankind. I've been obsessed by the Amazon forest for 25 years, and obsessed by my mother too, so it was a fertile doubling of subjects, which grew ever deeper as I wrote them. 

The book didn't get on any of the main poetry prize shortlists when it first appeared, and although I tried to ignore that, as I knew it's readers that count, I was discouraged. So much so, that I had cast it aside as a failure, and embarked on my next collection with renewed hope. It had got the Poetry Book Society's Choice, but what I'm trying to say is that it's so easy to lose faith in one's work, and I did. Then, miraculously, nine months after Mama Amazonica was published, it won the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize. It was the first time a poetry collection had won, and only the second time one had been shortlisted. Now that Mama Amazonica has also won the Laurel Prize, a poetry prize, I have to believe that what I set out to do with it worked for quite a few judges. But I also want to offer hope to other poets whose collections might be overlooked. It is so important to keep believing in your work – if you feel in your heart that it's achieved something valuable, keep faith, and you never know what might happen later. I also want to thank Simon Armitage for founding this visionary prize, at a time when the health of our planet is about to be damaged beyond repair unless we act. Even writing helps!

Here are some photos from my trips to the Peruvian Amazon where I researched for the poems.

view of the Madre de Dios and Tambopata rivers from small plane to Tambopata from Puerto Maldonado (photo credit Pascale Petit)

On an oxbow lake off the Tambopata River (photo by Brian Fraser)

Giant river otter aka river wolf in oxbow lake near Tambopata Research Center (photo credit Paul F. Condori, our guide aka Jungle Paul)

Macaws at the clay lick near Tambopata Research Center (photo credit Brian Fraser)

The author under an ironwood (photo by Brian Fraser)

Monkey frog on night jungle trek (photo by Brian Fraser)

Prize Photograph, a new poem from Tiger Girl

Photograph with permission of the photographer Biplap Hazra

Biplap Hazra, who took this prizewinning shot, has kindly given me permission to post his image here and on this week's edition of One Hand Clapping magazine. This terrifying photo provoked my poem 'Prize Photograph', which is featured in One Hand Clapping, and will appear in Tiger Girl, my eighth collection, to be published by Bloodaxe on 3rd September. Biplap later said that the calf survived the attack.

I saw wild elephants in Bandhavgarh National Park in Madhya Pradesh, though the ones I saw were ones that had just been captured by the park elephant handlers, to tame for tiger patrols, as poaching is such a threat to the tigers. Every morning the mahouts ride their elephants to scout for the cats and  check their safety – one bull came up to our gypsy jeep and demanded the banana he'd scented in my bag – I had no choice but to offer my breakfast. Being up close to those brandy topaz eyes – the Gypsy is open and I was on the top seat – is unforgettable, as is being felt by the soft but persistent trunk. Wild elephants don't usually include Bandhavgarh in their migration corridors, but they entered with newborns, so the zones they lingered in had to be closed to tourists. That they wander from their usual routes is worrying, as it can mean their migration forests are closed to them, or felled. In this photo, they are under siege from farmers, who are trying to protect their homes and crops.

Prize Photograph

 

And this wild elephant, crossing State Highway 9 –

his footprints lakes for dragonflies and bees –

 

does not yet know the chaff of a howdah,

ankle chains, or the sting of the bull hook.

 

His mother is ahead, her ears flapping

for his rumbles that she also feels through her feet.

 

Only now her feet are burning, and she’s

closed her ears to the firecrackers, the jeers

 

of the mob protecting their fields. Already

one farmer has hung himself when his crop

 

and home were trampled – how could he feed his family?

And one woman has been crushed to death.

 

The men lob tar firebombs at the invaders –

go back jungli haathi! they shout, banging

 

on tin drums. The matriarch runs from the noise,

doesn’t hear her calf scream, his back legs alight.

 

Hell is now and here the caption will say

as Biplap Hazra clicks the shot of his life.

Green Bee-eater – a poem from Tiger Girl

Tiger Girl will now be published by Bloodaxe on 3rd September 2020, postponed from June because of Covid-19, and in the lead-up I will post occasional poems from the book, together with photos of the Indian wildlife they celebrate. This is the green bee-eater, elusive to the lens, but captured here by my beloved (even his tongue!) when we were in Bandhavgarh National Park in Madhya Pradesh, this time last year – what a contrast to this year! But the birdlife there is matched by the wonders that visit our garden in Cornwall this May, every day bullfinches, goldfinches, greater spotted woodpeckers, dunnocks, nuthatches, collared doves, blackbirds, and many many more, come to feed here. It is a rainforest lush with ferns and nettles and wildflowers. It has been a memorable lockdown, and continues to be. 

I wrote 'Green Bee-eater', out of fascination for this masked forest in miniature, and prompted by coming across his song being described as a "tree-tree-tree". I was so happy that Poetry magazine published it in the April 2020 issue, along with 'Swamp Deer', thank you editors. There are a number of short bird and deer poems threaded through Tiger Girl, and I hope this one offers us some hope. 

Green Bee-eater

More precious than all
the gems of Jaipur –

the green bee-eater.

If you see one singing
tree-tree-tree

with his space-black bill
and rufous cap,

his robes
all shades of emerald

like treetops glimpsed
from a plane,

his blue cheeks,
black eye-mask

and the delicate tail streamer
like a plume of smoke –

you might dream
of the forests

that once clothed
our flying planet.

And perhaps his singing
is a spell

to call our forests back –

tree
      by tree
                 by tree.
 

Mama Amazonica goes Into the Forest for BBC Radio 3's The Verb

To research for Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe Books, 2017) I went to the Peruvian Amazon twice, once in the wet season and once in the dry. Tonight, I talk about my book on Radio 3's The Verb, with a gang of forest-lovers – the poet Claire Trévien, Kate Arnold on her dulcimer – lead of the group 'Fear of the Forest', Terry Deary, Jack Bernhardt, and our host Ian McMillan. It was a bit nerve-racking but Ian kept us amused and we had fun. I must admit I was thrilled to be chatting about one of my very favourite things – forests! The Amazon rainforest in my case, that very endangered, dangerous, but wondrous place. Mama Amazonica is immersed in it, but is also my mentally ill mother, a double exposure where love floresces. It's just over a year since the book came out and I've been extremely lucky that in May it won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018 – an award given for a book evoking the spirit of place. Here are just a few pics I took in Tambopata National Reserve, though the birds – jacamar, king vultures and blue-and-gold macaws, and the spectacled caiman, are taken by my husband Brian. 

 

Butterflies and moths of the Peruvian Amazon: writing Mama Amazonica

I've been meaning to collect all my photos of butterflies, moths and caterpillars taken in Tambopata National Reserve last year, so here they are, some taken by me with my iPhone and some by Brian with his camera. Of course these are only the ones we managed to capture, and don't include the zipping morphos like a blue lightning flash, or the clearwings transparent as glass, or the moths that sometimes bumped into our flashlights on nightwalks, the leaf butterflies that resemble dead crumpled leaves. But I've looked up their names and labelled them as well as I could. Some were big as my hand. 

The clouding ones, that gather on the clay riverbanks to suck minerals, greeted us almost every time we walked the narrow plank off the boat and climbed the slippery mud steps then endless steep and rickety wooden steps up the sheer bank. What a contrast they made, with the dirt of the mud and leaf litter and their silky luminous colours. In my poem 'Black Caiman with Butterflies' in Mama Amazonica, butterflies are "the beauty of the world", but it's a beauty that needs to drink mud and caiman and turtle eyes, that, like the metallic morphos, must feed on rotting fruit.  

There were times too when our guides, Berli Carpio on our first trip and Jungle Paul on our second, did not know the names of the butterflies, and there might well have been ones we saw that have no names, that have never been seen before. In our lodge at Tambopata Research Center entomologists are cataloguing new species every month.

 Phoebis philea and Anteos menippe butterflies feeding on minerals in mud

 Lasaia agesilas butterfly on the riverbank

 Heliconia

 Caterpillar seen on nightwalk in forest trail

 Uranius dayflying moths on riverbank

 Lasala agesilas with 88 butterfly and horsefly on riverbank

 Hummingbird hawkmoth

 Sphinx moth I saw on the dinner table, large as my hand

 Dyson's blue doctor with 88 butterfly (see also first pic of Blue doctor)

 small morpho?

 Owl butterfly seen near the pond in the island

Red-barred Amarynthis 

 Mystery caterpillar on nightwalk in forest

 More Uranius moths (and why not?)

 Julia butterflies or flambeaux on an oar in oxbow lake

 Flambeaux and snowy-whites drinking caiman tears

Heliconid

Strange Birds of the Peruvian Amazon, Writing Mama Amazonica

After the miracle of seeing a jaguar in the wild, comes the miracle of seeing the jaguar-of-the-skies, or harpy eagle. We saw this juvenile on our first trip in June 2016, and a chick in the nest on our second trip in December of that year. We also caught a glimpse of the mama! She is larger than the male, with a 2 metre wingspan, and she crashed through the canopy in a flash of ivory and black, like a giant Holy Ghost. She is the most powerful eagle in the world, with harpy talons. She was a visitation, a Mama Amazonica, and I tried to write about her in my seventh collection Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe, 2017), in a poem that also features that armadillo the juvenile eagle is clutching in his talons as he learns to hunt. The juvenile gawped at us for at least half an hour, and didn't quite seem to know what to do with his catch, you can just spot the armadillo tail below him. On our way down over the tangle of hillside roots, we saw the hole the armadillo once lived in.

 This is a greater Ani. They make a strange coughing or croaking sound  and cluster at oxbow edges and forest margins.

The most haunting song in the Amazon basin is surely from the pale-winged trumpeter just before dawn. The first time I heard it I thought that maybe it was a generator coming on, though Tambopata Research Center doesn't use generators but solar panels for energy. I thought of the wind playing overhead cables like a harp. And I thought of aliens – surely they had landed in the forest depths? It was a vibrato hum that went right through me and made the roof of my mouth tingle. It was almost four am, two hours before equatorial dawn, and the male howler monkeys had not yet started the first rumbles of their thunderous roars. The titi monkeys were still asleep and had not yet uttered their quarrelsome screaming barks. As the trumpeters faded, bats crashed into the network of strings overhead, a mesh designed to stop roof-nesting tarantulas from dropping on guests in their bed, or at least onto our mosquito veils which swathed the beds. My room was a cubicle in a traditional Ese-Eja wooden long house made from palm leaves, the outer wall open to the night and the jungle. The jungle frequently invaded: macaws, mouse possums, wolf spiders, bats, and who knows what, gobbled any food left out of the safe.

These are black skimmers, quite rare I think, we didn't see many. Here they are on a sandbank on the Tambopata.

A cocoi heron, saw many of these along the river and in oxbow lakes, larger than European herons.

The magisterial king vulture, photo by our guide Jungle Paul. All the other pics are by Brian Fraser.

Another miracle – I have written and read legends about these kings for decades. First time I saw them they were flying above TRC, the second time was here on the riverbank, scroll down to the next pic for the story! I've also seen them in the zoo of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, even a chick in the nursery! That couple, N'goro anhd Margo are ancient. There's a poem about them in Fauverie.

So here are the two king vultures, always first at the feast, while the black vultures and black hawks wait for their turn. The 'feast' is a giant golden catfish that's caught by a spectacled caiman. I've written about that incident in a previous post, but the gist of it is that the caiman had his snout up the catfish's thorax. It was the king vultures that drew us to the pile of driftwood, where we discovered the unfolding drama. The black hawks are waiting to eat the catfish, but might also follow the caiman to his lair, to eat his babies.