Tag: Steve Ely

Awareness of climate change and the growth of ecocritical theory have placed a new value on poetry which foregrounds the non-human.  This may lead to the revaluation of past writings about nature or to the emergence of conscious attempts to acknowledge non-human forms or beings as themselves rather than as appendages or furnishings for the human perspective.  Fundamentally, however, we, as humans, continue to impose our own views, needs and ways of understanding on the world around us, although our ways of representing that world may be changing with changes in our knowledge.

One wing of ecocriticism links the ecological battle to other struggles against oppression and for social justice as expressed in feminism, post -colonialism and LGBTQ+ theory. This alignment of the environment with other ‘victim’ categories, has led to an upgrade in the status of the poet, John Clare, who has become a favourite of ecocritics, perhaps at the expense of his more middle-class predecessor, William Wordsworth. For example, in The Value of Ecocriticism Timothy Clark claims:

The case of John Clare exemplifies how ecocriticism is altering the literary canon.  Clare’s status has risen substantially in the last twenty years, precisely because his work offers a less human-centric view of life, giving moral standing and value to individual birds and creatures of the field, openly persecuted.  At the same time, the reputation of Clare’s contemporary William Wordsworth as a ‘nature poet’ has become contestable, with the realisation of how deeply a problematically human- and even male-centred stance structures a poem like the famous ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud.’ For this is concerned with natural phenomena (daffodils in this case) overwhelmingly as a psychic resource, to be celebrated in almost consumerist terms for their contribution to personal growth and pleasure (‘I gazed and gazed, but little thought / What wealth the show to me had brought’ (emphasis added) – a ‘great wildlife spectacle’, in effect.^[1]

The John Clare poem which Clark chooses counter Wordsworth is ‘The Ballad of Swordy Well’ where the poet speaks in the voice of a personified tract of land threatened with enclosure and over-exploitation: ‘When grain got high the tasteless tykes / Grubbed up trees, banks and rushes’. Clark argues that Clare’s poem ‘demonstrates a rhetorical, conceptual and narrative inventiveness sensitive to the claims of non-human entities’. This may be so but Swordy Well or Swaddy Well as it was more commonly known cannot be held up as an example of nature uncorrupted by human influence.  The area had been a quarry since Roman times and was therefore shaped and marked by anthropogenic activity for centuries. 

Clark rightly recognises that ‘Clare bestows Swordy Well mainly with the language and perspective of a labourer who would formerly have lived with and from the land, but who is now fallen in want upon the parish.’^[2]  Clare’s poem recognises the parallels between the exploited habitat and the exploited peasant, both victims of what we would describe as oppressive capitalism. However, despite the poet’s strong feeling for the land, this is not really a biocentric or non-human-centric poem.  Swordy Well becomes an alter ego for Clare himself, and for the people whose lives and livelihood had been destroyed by the new agriculture, the demand for corn during and following the Napoleonic Wars and the appropriation of common land by larger farmers who could afford to finance the legally binding acts of enclosure.  Even so sensitive a portrayal as this cannot be more than a human perception of what the land has suffered and felt; it can never really represent the voice of the land.  Moreover, much of what Clare describes is presented in terms of the damage it has done to people and community: 

            Lord bless ye, I was kind to all

            And poverty in me

            Could always find a humble stall,

            A rest and lodging free.

            Poor bodies with a hungry ass

            I welcomed many a day

            And gave him tether-room and grass

            And never said him nay.

            There was a time my bit of ground

            Made freemen of the slave.   

            The ass no pindar’d dare to pound

            When I its supper gave.

            The gipsies’ camp was not afraid;

            I made his dwelling free, 

            Till vile enclosure came and made

            A parish slave of me.

This is a poem of political protest which recognises the injustice of the social system into which the poet was born, just a few steps away from villeiny or serfdom, which was to some extent mitigated by the existence of common land which made ‘freemen of the slave.’  It is most certainly anthropocentric but perhaps differs from other poetry of its time in that the poet recognises his kinship with the land and nature and identifies with it in fellow victimhood, rather than being awed or charmed by it as spectacle.  If we compare this poem with the famous passage from the stealing the boat episode in Wordsworth’s Prelude where the poet becomes aware of powers and forces in Nature which are terrifyingly other: 

   huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

we see a difference in perspective which may in part be connected to the types of natural phenomena the poets are writing about, in part to do with the difference in class of the two poets. 

The notion that the forms of Nature or behind nature ‘do not live/ Like living men’ contrasts sharply with Clare’s ability to empathise and identify with the creatures and even the land itself. Further insight into Wordsworth’s perception of Nature as ‘other’ is provided in the 1802 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Discussing his choice to use simpler language, stripped of poetic artifice, Wordsworth wrote:

Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.

This now seems a very peculiar idea, derived more from the poet’s poetic, psychic and philosophical needs than any empirical evidence. Nevertheless, it became ingrained in the Romantic credo and goes some way to explain the initial popularity of the poetry of John Clare and other peasant poets, who were seen to be closer to the elementary feelings and forms of Nature.  It is an attitude which, I feel, persisted into the reception of Seamus Heaney’s early work, a somewhat condescending admiration for the lowly, even oppressed figure, from a rural background who somehow had the authority to speak with authenticity about and even for the phenomena of the natural world.  However, neither Heaney nor Clare primarily seek to portray the non-human as separate from the human; rather they use their detailed knowledge of the natural environment to express their own condition or plight; Death of a Naturalist, Heaney’s first book, is largely to do with growing up and moving from innocence into experience, while Clare’s beleaguered gipsies, birds and tracts of land represent his own sense of displacement and loss.  Clare nevertheless shares with the modern ecologist the sense of nature as impermanent and threatened, in contrast to Wordsworth who speaks confidently of ‘the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.’ Granted, it is never quite clear whether these forms are real and phenomenal or underlying ideas.  

Clare, Wordsworth and Heaney must all be seen as writing anthropocentrically. They can do no other, because they write as humans. The quest for a biocentric poetry can be little more than a poetic conceit or enabling device to allow us as humans to devise new human ways of presenting non-human forms to ourselves.  There is a growing body of ecopoetry in which writers do search for new, less egocentric ways of writing about the environment and the non-human life forms with which we co-exist. ^[3] It may be instructive to compare two texts, written about fifty years apart, which present the life of the eel. The first is Seamus Heaney’s “Lough Neagh Sequence’, a group of seven poems which were included in his second collection, Door into the Dark (1969)^[4]; the second is Steve Ely’s book length poem, The European Eel (2021).^[5] I should say that I think that this is not Heaney’s best work, whereas I was extremely impressed by Steve Ely’s poem. Nevertheless, both poets work through their perceptions of the eel, its otherness, its strangeness which is so very not human, to present a world where human and eel co-exist and do have a relationship.  In the end, both poets use the eel as a device to say something about humans, because it is impossible for humans actually to assume the voice or perspective of the eel.

Most of Heaney’s sequence makes very little attempt at the eel’s point of view. The poems are dedicated to the Lough Neagh fishermen and it is with them that Heaney identifies. 

  Only in the second and sixth poems does he focus directly on the eel and its journey. Interestingly, in the second poem his eel is male:

Dark

 delivers him hungering

down each undulation.

This poem, like the sixth, where his eel becomes female, is written in a form of free verse where the beginnings of lines are not capitalised and the short, enjambed lines slither down the page imitating the shape and motion of the eel.  ‘Undulate’ is a word which seems intended for the eel and both Heaney and Ely make use of it. 

 However, in Heaney’s poem, the attraction of the word as an appropriate end to the poem does not compensate for the vagueness of meaning. We know that eels prefer to feed in the dark and shun daylight, so in this sense Heaney is accurate; furthermore, this image is thematic for the collection in which the poems appear. ‘Dark/delivers’ seems to be a metaphor of birth, while dark, as always, has connotations of fear, death and the unknown, all of which are shared by the eel. However, what undulation is the eel ‘hungering down’?  His own body? or the riverbed or  ditch where he is lurking? The ambiguity is annoying rather than enriching.  Ely uses the word to describe his eels at an earlier stage, when they are known as ‘glass eels’:

                                                            each travelling 

            in the flexural power of its new undulatory wiggle.

These lines are as idiosyncratically Ely as Heaney’s image is characteristic of him.  The combination of scientific and colloquial language, ‘flexural’, ‘undulatory’, and ‘wiggle’ as well as the repetition of the ‘əl’ sound which creates an auditory image of the newfound wiggle make the eel simultaneously strange and recognisable.

Heaney too presents the eel as strange and ‘other’; indeed, the choice to use free verse for the two eel poems creates a forceful contrast with the ‘human’ poems, which are written in one or another carefully rhymed fixed stanza forms, where the beginnings of lines are capitalised. The first and last poems are written in quatrains, whilst 3,4 and 5 are in tercets.The eel becomes the antagonist in Heaney’s poems, where the fishermen or the poet himself are the protagonists. This sense of conflict, pitting the human against the eel, carries over into the language: ‘The fishermen confront them one by one’. In this first poem, Heaney seems to be trying to establish an epic struggle, man against the elements, in a battle which has chivalric rules: ‘There is a sense of fair play in the game’. However, the heroic flavour is undermined by Heaney himself, when he criticises the fishermen’s fatalistic attitude to drowning, expressed in the repeated line: “The lough will claim a victim every year.’ The implication that this is some kind of sacrificial tax, exacted by the lough in payment for the harvest of eels is countered by the poet’s common-sense argument that on inland water, even on Lough Neagh, a fisherman who could swim would be able to stay afloat long enough to be rescued.  The apparent timelessness of eel fishing is put in doubt by reference to new gates and sluices put in place at Toomebridge.^[6] This doubt reappears in the fifth poem, Lifting:

            And when did this begin?

            This morning, last year, when the lough first spawned?

            The crews will answer, ‘Once the season’s in.’

The folksy wisdom of the fishermen is again undermined by the vagueness of the expression. In normal speech, ‘Once the season’s in’ would refer to a question about the future, i.e. ‘When will this begin?’ rather than responding to one about the past, as here. Further, it is unclear what is meant by ‘when the lough first spawned’ which recalls the mythic origin stories of the first poem. How can a lough ‘spawn’? Does the poet mean the fish within it spawn, even though we know that eels, which are at the centre of this poem, do not spawn in the lough? Throughout this sequence, we feel that the poet is struggling, on the one hand, to present an accurate picture of eel fishing while, on the other, to work out what the eel means to him. 

                                                            Each eel

            Comes aboard to this welcome:

            The hook left in gill or gum,

            It’s slapped into the barrel numb

            But knits itself, four-ply,

            With the furling, slippy

            Haul, a knot of back and pewter belly

            That stays continuously one

            For each catch they fling in

            Is sucked home like lubrication.

‘Welcome’ is a strange word to use in this context; perhaps it is ironic. The lines which follow, however, are visually and aurally effective as the poet describes the brutality of the hooks, and uses a combination of slithery ‘l’ s and plosives to convey the sound of the wet fish ‘slapped’ into the barrel. I can’t help asking how he knows the eel is ‘numb’ but am won over by the enjambed, coiling lines ‘furling, slippy/Haul, a knot of back and pewter belly’ only to be brought up short again by the confusing simile in the last line. How can a catch be ‘sucked home’ like ‘lubrication’? Although the image of slipperiness is maintained, the exact meaning is unclear. 

This is one of several places in the sequence where the poet swithers between empathy and revulsion. In the third poem which shows the fishermen collecting worms for bait, we can see the same fascinated disgust as he first describes the capture of the worm: “Nab him, but wait //For the first shrinking, tacky on the thumb’ and then sympathises with it, ‘Innocent ventilators of the ground’. The tactile language of the first quotation contrasts strangely with the Latinate vocabulary in the second again, to my mind, creating an uncertainty of tone in the poem.  Perhaps Heaney finds the solution to his dilemmas in the final poem where he stops trying to write about fishermen or eels in any objective sort of way and reveals the place of these amphibious images of land, water, worms and eels in his own psyche.

            Vision

Unless his hair was fine-combed

The lice, they said, would gang up

Into a mealy rope

And drag him, small, dirty, doomed

Down to the water. He was

Cautious then in riverbank

Fields. Thick as a birch trunk

That cable flexed in the grass

Every time the wind passed. Years

Later in the same fields

He stood at night when eels

Moved through the grass like hatched fears

Towards the water. To stand

In one place as the field flowed

Past, a jellied road, 

To watch the eels crossing land

Re-wound his world’s live girdle. 

Phosphorescent, sinewed slime

Continued at his feet. Time

Confirmed the horrid cable.^[7]

Interestingly, in this early version of the sequence, this poem comes first and I think that it illuminates the poems which follow. As the sequence stands, in the published version, we have to read meaning back into the group from the final piece. We are presented with a small child, recognisable from Death of a Naturalist although distanced from the poet by the use of third person.  This is a very vulnerable and insecure child, ‘small, dirty, doomed’, terrorised by the bogey threat used by adults to force compliance.  It is easy to see how the lice who ‘gang up/ Into a mealy rope’ metamorphose into the ‘four-ply’ oneness of the captured eels.  The ‘riverbank/ fields’ previously simply the place where the fishermen found their bait are revealed to be places of terror, where the wind rippling the grass suggests the ‘thick cable ‘ which is the monstrous rope, be it lice, worm or eel, which will drag the child down out of his own element into the water.  Migrating eels, even for the adult, are ‘hatched fears’ and their sinuous oneness is said to have ‘re-wound his world’s live girdle.’ This line may, to some degree, explain the line about the worms in the third poem ‘Making the globe a perfect fit’.  The ‘live girdle’ is an ambiguous image; it seems to take in the figure in the poem and the world, perhaps binding them together in a recognition of the continuity between human and the natural.  However, the final three lines and the curiously anticlimactic shudder of the last three words, suggest that this is not a happy resolution and that this ‘horrid cable’ of connectedness is a threat to life and identity. The sense of flux and disorientation is powerfully conveyed as the stationary becomes mobile and the solid turns liquid: ‘the field flowed past’, ‘eels crossing land’. Whether placed at the beginning or the end, this is by far the most successful poem of the sequence. At the same time, it confirms Heaney as a poet who is using the imagery of the non-human and the world around him to explore his own place in that world.^[8]

If, for Heaney, the eel is the antagonist, in The European Eel it is presented as the protagonist.  However, like Heaney, Steve Ely is concerned to show the creature as other, non-human and he takes considerable care to avoid anthropomorphism or sentimentality, specifically through the use of a vast amount of scientific and technical vocabulary, which creates the effect of objectivity and in forcing the reader to look up so many words, makes the eel and its environment strange.  This is a poetic device; it may allow for accuracy of detail and allow the poet to say things about the life of the eel which could not otherwise be conveyed, but no matter how latin or greek and unfamiliar, this is still human labelling, not the language of the eel itself.  There is, however, a relish in bringing this scientific lexis into the poetic realm:

                        the bluefin persist into open ocean,

            harrowing the holocaust photocline with xiphius,

            macrocephalus, savage architeuthis. 

                                                                        p.47

The notes tell us that xiphius, macrocephalus and architeuthis are swordfish, sperm whales and giant squid, all names with which most readers are more familiar. Ely subdues the jaw-breaking terms to the music of his propulsive unrhymed lines with their ancestral memory of blank verse.

The poet counters the estranging, alienating effect of scientific language with sudden incursions of the familiar, for example, when he describes how the minute leptocephali, eels in their larval stage, begin to feed: ‘hunts /in the eutrophic blizzard, seizing diatoms, /dinoflagellates, polyethylene microbeads’. This has the same shocking effect as Chris Jordan’s photographs of the guts of baby albatrosses that have died from ingesting plastic. It also reveals the human purpose of Ely’s poem. He is not writing as the eel, or even directly for the eel, but for, or to, humans, showing us how we have created the toxic environment which has made the eel, like so many other non-human creatures, an endangered species.

At one level, this is an epic like the Odyssey, recounting the maritime journeys and adventures of its hero and celebrating miraculous escapes and astounding achievements; as in the Odyssey, the initial group of voyagers reduce to one.  However, unlike Odysseus, Ely’s eventual protagonist is neither male, nor human and although her journey brings her home and unites her with a ‘nuptial’ partner, it results in new life for her progeny but in her own death. At another level, though, this is a poem which seeks to inform and persuade. It is a protest poem and as such, employs some techniques which are as much journalistic as poetic.  Ely provides a detailed set of notes, which go some way to absolving him of the charge of obfuscation. In addition, he frequently uses journalistic or didactic similes, as opposed to purely poetic ones. In a poem we are accustomed to seeing the simile used to draw a comparison between two known elements so that we see one or both of them in a new light.  Heaney very few similes in his sequence, although there are many metaphors which work in a similar way: ‘Thick as a birch trunk/ That cable flexed in the grass’ (Vision). Here the cable which has already been introduced  in the first stanza as the ‘mealy rope’of lice is given dimension by being compared to a ‘birch trunk’, something which we can also relate to.  In the didactic simile, one of the terms is unknown. Showing us the feeding leptocephali, Ely writes:

            A month or so since hatching, the size

            of an April tadpole, they move in the plankton

            like Pac-Man’ 

                                    p.11

This is a brilliant simile, because it is so visually effective but also smacks us straight back into the realities of the Anthropocene which are listed in gruesome detail at the bottom of the same page:

            oestrogen-saturated sewage, methamphetamine

            neurotoxins, chromosome-warping

            neonicotinoid run-off.  The leptocephali soak it up,

            and tumble to Hatteras with the flotsam

            of the current – single-use Canaveral

            space junk, the strip mall’s car-tossed,

            fast-food trash and radioactive manatees.

Such passages, which could be described as merely eco-rant, are redeemed by their rhythmic force, their skilful deployment of assonance and alliteration and by the surprising juxtapositions which keep us alert and make us want to know more.  I think the manatees are radioactive because they seek refuge in the warm waters created by nuclear power stations.

As the eel reaches England, the landmarks and ecological disasters become more familiar and homegrown. Ely seizes the opportunity to show his political hand: ‘they’ll travel north and west/ into the PRIVATE salmon and brown trout streams/ of Northfield’s Tory spots day;’ and 

            Barely a cordon, hardly a shoal, they move into the kingdom

            of the Amazon Fulfilment Centre, its clear-fell

            devastation of investment, jobs and growth.

                                                                                                p.20

Ely’s distaste for consumerist modernity sometimes topples over into growling misanthropy as when he fantasises a cultural avatar of the eel, the Bentley Worm:^[9]

                                                seizing tribute

            from the ranks of the High Street’s drunks

            and the grave-yard’s coked-up, shrieking children.

                                                                                                p.25

Nevertheless, despite the devastation of the deindustrialised landscape the eel travels through, when she eventually reaches Frickley Beck, there is enough goodness left to sustain the survivor and perhaps the faith of the writer in the ‘dark pleroma’ defined by him in his notes as ‘the fullness of life and spirit on Earth’:

                                    you can still tickle trout,

            and river fish flee before your bootsteps – 

            dace and gudgeon, bullhead and barbel,

            the odd patrolling pike. And eels, of course,

                                                                                    p28

This is one of only a few authorial intrusions into the poem, where we understand that he has brought the eel to his own place, somewhere he knows personally and where, we learn from the prose interlude between the two sections of the poem, he has captured the eel which he kept in an aquarium for three months in order to study its behaviour.  

Generally, the poet keeps himself out of the eel’s story, fulfilling his intention of foregrounding the natural object and avoiding anthropomorphism. Sometimes, though, the empathy seems so strong that it becomes a form of anthropomorphism, as in the final three page long account of the eel’s mating and orgasm which matches Molly Bloom’s in intensity. The eel is described as shivering ‘in the warm,/aphrodisiac current, every nerve-end tingling,/ each tender tip engorged.’ ‘Aphrodisiac’ is surely an adjective which is culturally human and just as I found myself asking how Heaney knew his eel was ‘numb’ so I wonder how Ely knows his has ‘tingling’ nerve-ends. I suppose the description is physiologically justifiable but the arousal and excitement of these final pages draws on human feeling and experience.

In the reflective essay which appears in the blog of the Longbarrow Press, Ely presents three hypotheses which underpinned the writing of his long poem.^[10]

My first research hypothesis asserted that grounding the writing of the poem in scientific research, ecological commitment, and direct, sustained experience of the natural object would provide the basis for writing about nature that would have scientific as well as literary credibility, and might therefore contribute in an informed way to debate about the ecological and human crises of the Anthropocene. I think the poem vindicates the hypothesis. The engagement with research that informed the piece is clear, as is the ecological commitment. The natural object is foregrounded, protagonism^[11] is limited to the structurally necessary middle section, and the piece is, I hope, not exploitative or parasitic. The poem has the potential to educate and inform the poetry reading public and be an adjunct to scientific research.

Ely hoped that researching the eel as a scientist or scientific journalist might have done would allow him to write in a way which would have scientific as well as literary credibility. He believes he has done this and this may well be the case.  However, the poetry -reading audience is at best, fairly small and it is questionable how far this poem does more than could be done by a good, popular science writer.  For me, this poem does succeed in foregrounding the representative endangered species and so contributing to ‘debate about the ecological and human crises of the Anthropocene’. However, I can’t help wondering if the poetry needs the eel more than the eel needs the poetry. In other words, are poets seeking to justify their endeavours by taking on the mantle of the scientist and the eco-crusader? And, if so, is there anything wrong with that?

The second hypothesis asserted that writing emerging from an engagement with scientific research, ecological commitment and direct, sustained experience of the natural object will show the influence of those factors in the foregrounding of the natural object, the nature of the language used, the forms and structures adopted and in an expression that seeks to create its effects as much by the artful deployment of empirically, experimentally and experientially derived knowledge as by rhetorical means. Again, I feel that the poem vindicates the hypothesis. The poem is replete with scientific and technical language to the degree that a distinctive register is achieved, and the engagement with research that underpins it echoes through its structure and language. The natural subject is foregrounded, in a largely non-anthropomorphic manner. The poem’s epic monology, a deviation from my usual dialogic, polyphonic practice when composing longer poems, emerges directly from the ethos and praxis implied in this hypothesis.

This is where I think Ely justifies his project.  His poem is ‘replete with scientific and technical language’ and does create a ‘distinctive register’.  This is not simply through the acquiring of empirical and experientially derived knowledge, which is surely what we do all the time to some extent anyway, but by the artful deployment, using the poetic skills, traditionally called rhetoric, of the unfamiliar scientific and technical vocabulary.

The third hypothesis asserted that it is possible for writing that is shaped by the first two hypotheses to nevertheless demonstrate a sophisticated and reflexive artistic subjectivity that constitutes affective, but non-didactic art. I believe that the principles embodied in the first two hypotheses led directly to the vindication of the third hypothesis, in the specific and unexpected sense that the decision to imagine in detail the lifecycle of the European eel paradoxically highlighted the elisions, lacunae and uncertainties in our knowledge of the species, and created in me an overwhelming sense of its enigma and otherness. This produced a speculative expression that infuses a religious or spiritual aspect into what began as a strictly scientific project and broadens the focus from the European eel to the cosmic context of life on Earth. I’ll conclude with some reflections on this unexpected development.

Ely suggests his poem is ‘affective but non-didactic’; this contradicts the intention, stated in the first hypothesis, to educate and inform. As far as I can see, the poem is both affective and didactic, but not preachy.  The rest of this paragraph refers most obviously to the last part of the poem, which presents the part of the eel’s journey about which least is known, that is, its return to the Sargasso. As the poet himself admits, in another authorial intrusion: ‘I’m making it up as they go along.’ (p.44) What the poet seems to be acknowledging is that the unsolved mysteries of the eel have propelled him into writing not a treatise, but a poem. He takes this further by suggesting a ‘religious or spiritual aspect’ which is indeed reflected in some of the language in the final pages, which abound in aureate expressions almost as ornate as the gold leaf on a medieval icon: ‘her gold load’, ‘glittering golden ova’, ‘cornucopean flame’.  I’m not sure about this; I felt that the poem was working very well without this dimension and that the poet had conveyed his respect for the eel’s ‘enigma and otherness’ very successfully by the scientific language mediated by explanatory or didactic metaphor and simile found throughout the poem.  

I admire this poem because Ely has succeeded in presenting and foregrounding one of the natural objects with which we share our world in such a way as to show how the human and the non-human co-exist and to emphasize the damage inflicted by the human on other species. By presenting the eel’s life in the recognisably human form of epic, just as Clare chose to represent Swordy Well through a recognisably human first person voice, Ely has shown us which side he is on – the side of the oppressed and the threatened, whether it be by capitalism, industrial and agricultural revolutions or consumerist pollution.  The poem attempts to be with and for ‘nature’ whilst respecting non-human otherness, rather than distinct from and threatened by nature and indeterminate but terrifying natural forces, which is what we see in Heaney’s ‘Lough Neagh Sequence’ and in the boat-stealing episode from The Prelude.

---

^[1] The Value of Ecocriticism by Timothy Clark (Cambridge, 2019), p.11

^[2] Ibid, p.8

^[3] The very awkward locutions I use here arise out of the attempt not to refer to Nature or the natural, terms which are always problematic.

^[4] Faber

^[5] With artwork by P.R. Ruby, Longbarrow Press

^[6] The poem implies that these measures are intended to maximise the catch, rather in the manner of factory fishing, and so this might seem to be an ecological protest., or a romantic protest against an industrialising   process. However, the sluices and gates have a more complex purpose and are used to allow a certain number of eels to escape and to maintain numbers of eels arriving into the lough where they will spend years maturing.  https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjV9fzdxZfyAhWMJMAKHfZ-B-cQFnoECAMQAw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fuk-northern-ireland-33892222&usg=AOvVaw2o9MoLRD0qH30ceMCYxcYN

^[7] https://belfastgroup.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/groupsheets/heaney1_10415/

^[8] I don’t intend to suggest that Heaney should have been writing eco-poetry, or been more aware of the eel. When he wrote the sequence, the eel was not an endangered species and awareness of what is now referred to as the Anthropocene was in its infancy.

^[9] Google does not seem to recognise this creature but in behaviour it seems to resemble the Lambton worm, a monster from medieval legend which terrorised the Durham countryside until eventually vanquished by the man who had first discovered it as a small, elver-like creature.

^[10] https://longbarrowblog.wordpress.com/2021/07/02/body-of-dark-steve-ely/

^[11] Ely uses ‘protagonism’ to mean authorial intrusion into the poem.