More than a year ago, a poet named Christopher Manieri sent me a message on social media. Would I write about his book of poetry? Okay, I answered, send me a copy. He did. It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally read it.
Ascent is self-published, or published through Amazon. I admire the courage that takes. I wouldn’t go that route, because I want to work with an editor, to make sure that what I’ve written is worth sharing with others. Believing that your work has value no matter what anyone else says takes guts.
Belief is the central focus here. The author obviously has a strong religious faith. Most of the poems move from some form of doubt or pain or confusion towards a resolution located in faith—in our essential unity within God or something else bigger than ourselves. Not all the poems fit that pattern, though, and they’re the ones that interest me the most. My favourite is “The Emissary,” which relates a fable about an old man tasked with carrying a message to a distant city. The journey is long and difficult, and when finally arrives, the city has been destroyed. He stands “alone in the empty silence, alone in his dread.” I like the repetition of “alone” in this line, and the lack of certainty and resolution in the poem. Maybe that’s just personal taste. Others might take solace in the answers most of the poems provide. Me, I’m more interested in questions.
But the more poetry there is, the better, I say. Do I’m happy that this book exists.
Yes, I’m including chapbooks in my list. Why not? They’re short, but they have pages, covers, words. I like this one a lot: Ariel Gordon’s A Mudlarker’s Diary. It’s published by Pinhole Poetry, and it’s lovely as an object: there are tiny illustrations, it’s printed on nice stock, it’s sewn and not stapled. Nice.
When I think about mudlarking, I think of Victorian London, and urchins collecting pennies and buttons on the bottom of the Thames at low tide. I know people still do mudlarking there, but the word “mudlarking,” its combination of river bottom and joy, feels Victorian.
But you don’t have to cross an ocean to go mudlarking. Ariel Gordon does it in Winnipeg, where a CPR landfill and a bottle recycling depot beside the Red River disgorge their collections of broken glass and china into the water and the mud. Not just fragments, either: sometimes Gordon finds entire bottles, sometimes unbroken glass stoppers. It’s a meditative practice, it’s exercise, it’s material for her writing. Including A Mudlarker’s Diary.
These poems are a diary, covering spring, summer, and fall of 2023 in fourteen poems, all written in tercets, all free verse. They’re walking poems, too; that’s how Gordon and her colleagues make their way along the gumbo beside the brown water. Repeated themes emerge: leaky rubber boots (punctured by sharp debris), falling in the mud, the way different kinds of material is uncovered as the water level rises and falls, the human and more-than-human residents in and along the river (encampments of unhoused people, police putt-putting by in their patrol boat, various passers by, other mudlarkers, ducks and geese, willows and toads). Gordon takes to asking the Red for specific objects—unbroken stoppers, for instance—which it then provides. This damaged place, polluted and abused, has so much life. Gordon’s poems do, too.
I encourage you to order a copy from Pinhole Poetry, but hurry: my copy is number 50 out of an edition of 60. The supply of broken glass in and alongside the Red River is endless; the number of copies of A Mudlarker’s Diary is not.
I discovered Václav Cílek’s To Breathe With Birds: A Book of Landscapes through Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, where the last essay, “Bees of the Invisible,” is mentioned. I had read that essay, but not the rest of the book until the past week. What a strange book! Odd and oddly compelling.
Cílek is a climatologist and a geologist as well as an essayist, and these essays tend to bring together the geology of Czechia (where Cílek lives) and the history that’s been influenced by that geology. What’s under the ground influences what happens on the surface. But Cílek is also fascinated by sacred stories and legends (the more local, the better), and sometimes an essay will move between science and mythology quickly. The model for this kind of movement might be Johannes Kepler’s essay about snowflakes, discussed here in “The Six-Cornered Snowflake,” which also (according to Cílek) brings together rational inquiry, imaginative speculation, and theology. B
ut in Cílek’s writing, this mixture isn’t just thematic. In “Places from the Other Side,” for instance, Cílek leaps from a travelogue about different places in the Sudetenland to a reconfiguration of himself as vapour, a rock in a stream, “a green light, a willow above the river,” “beeches on the banks.” He realizes that the bears in the castle moat are actually humans who only pretend to be bears when they’re being observed by people. “We travel to places like Český Krumlov because certain ideas occur only in particular regions and places,” he concludes. Aside from emphasizing the effects places have on us, and we have in them, the point seems to be that the world exceeds all of our interpretative frameworks—scientific, mythological, imaginative—and so we need all of them to comprehend what’s around us.
Cílek also tends to make pronouncements, reminding me of Gaston Bachelard, among others. It’s a peculiarly European way of writing, which one either finds charming or annoying, depending on one’s mood. (There—a pronouncement! You don’t have to be European to play that game.)
Sometimes the essays have a surprising, even mysterious, structure. “Walking Through a Landscape” starts out with a relatively common idea about walking and place: moving through rural places on foot is calming, and we apprehend the land’s “indefinite sanctity” and the history of human connections with it. Then, in the second paragraph, it takes up dwarves (which apparently have a literal existence here) as the spirit protectors of houses. The last two paragraphs (it’s a short essay) argue that gardening creates a community that brings together the human and the more-than-human—including dwarves. But other essays here are less, well, fanciful. The one about the history of asphalt as the dominant modern material is surprising and soberly researched. I wish I’d read it while I was working on Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road. Not that one mode is better than the other: the surreal and the straightforward are both welcome. And there’s a lot of surrealism here: “The Standard Central Bohemian Vision”brings together visions, folktales, and dreams about the dead.
I’ve been at a conference on pilgrimage this week, and I’ve been thinking about “Bees of the Invisible,” in which Cílek sets out a series of rules for wayfaring. In The Old Ways, Macfarlane describes similar rules, but he connects them to the notion of “improvised pilgrimage.” What links wayfaring and pilgrimage? An online Czech dictionary provides the explanation: the Czech word “poutník” translates as both wayfarer, traveller, journeyer, and pilgrim. Other essays here consider different pilgrimages: to Maková hora (Poppy Mountain), to a complex of Christian buildings on Svatá hora (Holy Mountain). On those examples, the translator, Evan W. Mellander, uses the term “pilgrimage,” but all of the journeys here, whatever their destinations, could be seen as improvised pilgrimages. When Cílek describes himself, in “Bees of the Invisible,” as “a wayfarer, not a conqueror,” he could also be calling himself a pilgrim. The places he visits are all sacred in one way or another, although he argues that some places are more sacred than others. Their loss—through urbanization, abandonment, the construction of mines or nuclear power plants—therefore affects him deeply. Even the destruction of the geodiversity of the world (the richness of its subterranean strata) upsets him just as much as the loss of ecodiversity. That makes sense: he’s a geologist, after all. I want to return to this strange book and explore its oddnesses. I wonder what else Cílek has written that’s been translated into English.
I’ve written about Matthew Anderson’s Someone Else’s Saint: How a Scottish Pilgrimage Led to Nova Scotia here before (about a year ago, in fact), and as preparation for the pilgrimage conference I mentioned in my last post, I reread it last week. I have more things to say about it (rereading typically reveals something new about even a book you know well, in my experience), but I don’t want to scoop myself. Let me just say that Someone Else’s Saint is thoughtful and nuanced, and that Anderson is a gentle and learned guide.
I wish I could remember who recommended Robert Twigger’s Walking the Great North Line to me. I’d like to thank whoever it was publicly, for two reasons: I hadn’t heard of it until that person told me about it, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Twigger, the author of a dozen books, realized one day that many ancient sacred sites in England, including Stonehenge and Avebury Circle, are arranged on a line leading north from Christchurch on the south coast to the Isle of Lindisfarne, close to the Scottish border. He decided to make a walking pilgrimage along that line, mostly alone but sometimes accompanied by friends, as a way of learning more. The educational process this book reveals is embodied and experiential; by the time he reaches Lindisfarne, Twigger (and his readers) have learned about tribal religions (mostly ancient, mostly in England), the link between sacred places and water (all those holy springs!), the way that a series of religions has been drawn to those places (not, he argues, because they were poaching on their competitors but because those places have something special). He also learns about himself, particularly his timidity when confronted by landowners about his trespassing and its sources, both personal and social.
I learned other things from this book: the strict limits on access to private land in England (stay on the footpath!), how to ford a river, how to stealth camp, what to do when it rains constantly. I’ve always thought that the reuse of sacred sites (and festival dates) was just a form of clever marketing, but the connection between those places and springs of fresh (and sometimes mineralized) water is making me reconsider my sceptical materialism. I don’t agree with his advice about avoiding blisters (oversized boots, in my experience, cause rather than prevent them), but if that works for him, I’m glad.
I’m giving a paper at a pilgrimage conference this week, and Walking the Great North Line helped me get into the right frame of mind. Plus Twigger is an enjoyable narrator, not afraid of revealing his many errors and ridiculousnesses. He might be a fun walking companion, at least for a few days.
An added bonus: he briefly discusses something I’ve been struggling to write about, and that discussion, and his sources, will help me understand my thoughts as I keep trying.
So thanks, friend who recommended this book!
(Edit: it was Joy Hamilton! Eventually I remember things. Thanks, Joy!)
The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, has a straightforward thesis: the technology that goes by the name “AI”—a “marketing term,” according to the authors—is a con, “a bill of goods you are being sold to line someone’s pockets.” It’s a form of hype that uses tropes from science fiction to make the technology, and its creators, “appear powerful—if not godlike—in their technical creation.” It’s a technology that doesn’t deliver on promises of its wealthy proponents. Instead, those “well-placed players are poised to accumulate significant wealth from other people’s creative work, personal data, or labor, and replacing quality services with artificial facsimiles.” The infrastructure on which it operates is made from rare-earth minerals and is manufactured with toxic chemicals, used outrageous amounts of water for cooling, and is likely to make decarbonizing our economy impossible. It’s a massive surveillance machine. It encourages managers to fire actual human employees because they figure that AI slop can do the same work more cheaply. (The fact that it can’t doesn’t matter, apparently.) It perpetuates the racism and sexism that’s in its training data. It’s inherently unreliable, generating wrong answers to questions and making the work of research—figuring out which sources are credible and which aren’t—impossible. The investment bubble it’s creating (bigger now than when the book was written) could cause an economic collapse when it pops. And, they argue, it needs to be resisted.
Bender, a computational linguist, and Hanna, the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, describe generative AI—platforms like ChatGPT and Claude, which run on large language models—“synthetic text extruding machines” which mimic speech but have no intelligence and are incapable of forming a communicative intention. Like ELIZA, the chatbot developed by Joseph Weizenbaum in the late 1960s, these platforms fool us into thinking that they’re intelligent, mostly because we’re prone to attributing intelligence to things that seem to have language, the way we see faces in clouds (a phenomenon called pareidolia). Predicting which word follows in a series without knowing what any of the words actually mean isn’t a sign that the machines are thinking or conscious. Besides, we don’t really know what consciousness or intelligence actually are. We don’t have clear definitions of either term that would help us measure the claims of many AI proponents. We’re falling for an illusion, Bender and Hanna argue, and the hype surrounding AI is driven more by FOMO than anything rational.
The AI Con covers a lot of ground. It’s well-researched but approachable, its prose almost breezy. I’m not a fan of generative AI, so I’m prone to agree with its arguments, so in my case, Bender and Hanna are preaching to the choir. Still, they unpack the actual harms this technology is causing while seeing through the hype about its potential risks and putative benefits. Because the technology is developing so rapidly, it’s already a little out of date, even though it was just published last year; the economic and ecological damage AI is causing seems to be worse than the book suggests, and the resistance to generative AI and the data centres on which it runs has exploded in the past six months. Still, Bender and Hanna seem to know what they’re talking about, and The AI Con is a useful corrective against the technological triumphalism and the rhetoric of inevitability that surrounds AI. We see both in our federal government’s AI strategy—and just about everywhere else. I’m glad I read it. The next AI book I’ll tackle will be Karen Hao’s Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. But that won’t happen right away, mostly because I didn’t bring it with me on this trip. Oh, and also because life’s too short to spend all my energy thinking about AI.
There’s a reason Simon Armitage is the UK’s poet laureate: he is, as a Brit might say, bloody marvellous. Exhibit A: New Cemetery. So much is going on in these 100 pages. I’m not quite sure where to start.
Okay, I’ll pick a place: Armitage’s introduction, in which he explains that a field up the hill from his house in a Yorkshire village became a cemetery, and his neighbours objected. Armitage did not. What if the land was sold anyway and became something truly obnoxious, like an industrial park or an Amazon warehouse? Or, from the perspective of 2026, a data centre? There are worse neighbours, he thought. Then came Covid, and then his father’s sudden death, which clearly gutted him. All of this is explored in this book’s poems.
At the same time, Armitage’s other commitments—translations, commissioned books, and general poet laureating—were making it difficult to write other things. The solution was to write these short poems, all of which use the same form: three-line stanzas (tercets is the technical term), with each line indented below the one before. That gives the book an unusual consistency. So does the way each poem is dedicated to a different species of moth. Armitage notes how insect populations are plummeting, taking the starving birds with them—another loss, another kind of death worth mourning. Those common names aren’t titles—the idea always was to leave these poems untitled—but sometimes there’s an odd resonance between the eccentric nomenclature and the poetry.
Along with cemetery, his father, his ecological anxiety, Armitage is sometimes charmingly self-effacing (a national poet laureate could easily go in a more egoistic direction) about his difficulties writing, and sometimes even self-lacerating. He’s also funny and his words often made me stop and reread what I’d just finished reading out of sheer joy and surprise. And, sometimes, I learned something about Armitage. The poem “[Reddish Light Arches],” for instance, laments the death of “[t]he Fall guy.” I’m Armitage’s age (well, six months younger than), and I knew the Manchester band he was referring to, but couldn’t remember the lead singer’s name or when he died. Wikipedia reminds me: Mark E. Smith, the lead singer, songwriter, and only consistent member of the Fall, died of cancer in 2018. But Wikipedia tells me more: Armitage is a lifelong music fan, particularly of the Fall, and the only UK poet laureate who is also a deejay. So the poem, despite its apparently offhand reference to Smith, is about a band Armitage loves, and its final imagining, in the last three stanzas, of Smith’s resurrection goes beyond elegy:
Here’s Smith’s infamous irascibility, his voice like a cawing crow, his lung cancer, his aggression, his music, and Armitage’s deep love for all of it. But also present are the books various dead: those interred in the cemetery up the road, but also Armitage’s father, whose death overshadows the second half of New Cemetery.
I want to give a sense of how Armitage writes about the landscape, particularly the cemetery, but it’s hard to pick just one poem. Here’s “[Orange Footman],” chosen more or less at random, since singling one poem out of all these bangers feels wrong:
Here’s a photo, one of my copy’s title page, inscribed by the author, who was the keynote speaker at the conference in Leeds I’m flying home from:
He seems to have misspelled my name, a detail which inspired this poem. It tries to imitate Armitage’s form, and his reliance on half-rhymes and alliteration, and while it might not be very good (I hesitate to include it here), it exists, which means that I can keep working on it:
The Famous Poet Signed his Book
but he seems to have misspelled my name,
perhaps because he misheard it (I’m told
I mumble) or maybe he’s fed up with the poetry dog
and pony show, the claims on his time, big and small, the lectures and commissions,
tours and interviews, and the grinning, nervous fans who line up waving
hardcovers and paperbacks and babbling garbled praise, when he’d prefer
wrestling rhymes beneath the skylight in his attic room, his pen, the village quiet, and a cooling cup of tea.
I’m not sure how All the Wild Horses of Iceland came into my possession—I suspect my friend Tanis MacDonald sent it to me in trade for some books about walking, because there’s a postcard from her tucked inside—but I’m glad it did, and that I read it near the end of my trip to England, since it’s partly about the difficulties of travelling across continents a thousand years ago. Eyvind of Eyri, the protagonist of the story our unnamed narrator tells, travels from Iceland to somewhere in Central Asia and back, and his remarkable and life-changing story makes the small problems of contemporary travel (missed trains, airline food) seem very small indeed.
I was impressed by the way Tolmie imagines Eyvind’s world, which is so dramatically different from ours, in a way that feels completely believable. This is a kind of fantasy, of course, but it has a dense texture and heft. I know “heft” suggests a long book, which this isn’t—it’s short enough that I read most of it over dinner last night—but I can’t find another word that describes its serious evocation of historical otherness. So many people love fantasy fiction, and although there are no elves or wizards here, that otherness, that strangeness, ought to appeal to those readers. At the same time, though, there’s a complexity and nuance here. No clashes between good and evil, no moral absolutes, just people navigating events and obstacles they didn’t choose.
And the writing! What a voice. I wish I could write like this. No single quotation is likely to give you a sense of what the prose is like, particularly because of the way Tolmie immerses us in Eyvind’s world. A quotation from the middle of the book wouldn’t make sense; you’ve got to begin at the beginning, slowly developing a feeling for this alien but recognizable environment.
The internet tells me that All the Horses of Iceland made the New York Times list of the best books of 2022. It deserves that honour.
So, Tanis, if you read this, thanks for the book, and I wish I’d read it sooner.
