Amy De’Ath, Not a Force of Nature

 

No community is to me
            as I once
caved in to you I said
beware! the Diversion of the Populace
            who were think is nice, maybe
unscrolling after death

and shut out of a more
            screen-time time
a common day of breathing
            the cacti the glass windows
and through them our lungs.
And through them all ways
of unseeing ourselves

            and through them (“That Well of Tears is Mine”)

The author of a handful of smaller titles over the past fourteen years, the full-length debut by Suffolk-born UK poet, critic and editor—she co-edited the anthology Toward. Some. Air. (Banff AB: Banff Centre Press, 2015) with Fred Wah [see my review of such here]—Amy De’Ath is Not a Force of Nature (Brooklyn NY: Futurepoem, 2024), an expansive collage of lyrics set as moments, declarations, expositions and accumulations. “It’s a good night to stay home & work a delivery tread / on the yeast farm,” she writes, to open the poem “Force Of Nature,” “then pour oneself into a plaster-of-Paris / model of our own activities. It’s a fine night to entertain!” Her poems are incredibly smart, self-aware and gestural, offering commentaries and notes on ecological disaster and how capitalism reduces human capacity. “When you’re walking on a stage / The affirmation of a union / Should living offend the dead,” she writes, to open the poem “Transferable Skull,” “Or should I avenge thee / When you’re walking on a star / Managed not to get pregnant / I lied, I don’t know who you are [.]”

De’Ath writes of and on catastrophe and collapse, including a critique of Edward Burtynsky through her poem “Institutional Critique,” that includes: “Burtynsky I told you I’m not / trying to editorialize, this is not / an indictment of the industry, this is / what is it? / we are compelled to progress / to a dry toxic wastebed / Burtynsky I’m one of the foot soldiers / in the war on sustainability [.]” Structured in four sections, the collection holds two untitled bookend clusters on either side of the sections “EIGHT LOVE SONNETS” and “EIGHT WORK EMAILS.” “By refusing to sign the new contract you are / Not acting in the spirit of the contract.” she offers to open the poem “Dear Simon,” a piece signed at the end by Simon himself. In many ways, the poems in Not a Force of Nature are composed as a collection around voice and constraint, such as through articulating a sequence of characters that seemingly compose work email poems to themselves, whether hoping to catch or correct their own behaviours. Or, as “Simone” writes to herself in “Dear Simone,” “It’s wrong, what Patrick Swayze said / in his penitential prayer: this is your space, / but that’s yours too. Every time I think I’m / getting close to you we lose our touch.”