Duck Women – 26/10/2024

I am relieved to know that I’ll never meet a rhizodont. A seven-metre-long predatory fish with huge teeth could only be more terrifying if you told me that it had evolved to move on land too so that I am safe nowhere. Oh, it did. Brilliant. I thought I’d covered the stuff of nightmares last week.

Nevertheless, since the rhizodont has been extinct for a few hundred million years, I can devote my thoughts to travelling in time with a poetry collection named after the creature. Katrina Porteous’s Rhizodont, spins one through the ages, accompanied by Northumbrian dialects, the chatter of school children and parlance of fisherman, the language of birds and the wallops and whispers of the sea.

In ‘Tiny Lights’ one moves, whilst remaining on the same spot, from the edge of an industrial estate to the prehistoric depths of the ocean. In ‘Coastal Erosion’ words disappear along with the land until we see a future where all that ‘will survive of us is not love but chip forks.’ Porteous evokes the archives held in the landscape, conjures the changing sounds of a future with more lost species and pulls the reader to a present in which the seas bear people forced from their homes.

The poems were written in collaboration with scientists, with current wildlife from seaweeds to birds to snails and with the inhabitants of the same place some very long time ago.

The poem addressing a ‘cubby’, an eider, draws a wonderful picture of a curious bird investigating the sights and smells in the mud by the shore. This celebratory poem struck me. I had been looking at pictures of these ducks whilst reading The Place of Tides by James Rebanks.

The Yorkshire farmer’s latest book is brilliant. I felt like the inquisitive cubby, burying my ‘neb’ in the story. Rebanks is recounting the weeks in which he joined Anna, on Fjærøy, Norway, to harvest the down left behind by nesting eiders. The book is filled with waiting: for the right time to travel, for the weather to allow for cleaning and drying nesting boxes, for the birds to oblige by arriving, for Anna to lay out a complex breakfast each morning with due ceremony. The waiting is as important as the exhausting work to come as Anna is persuaded to share the story of her ancestors, how she came to be a ‘duck woman’, the traditions she is fighting to keep alive and the reasons this has become so hard. Keen to ‘do tasks’ – carrying something, appears to be his ideal state – Rebanks is forced to watch and listen. The resulting book becomes a fable about an ageing woman quietly acting out of love, trying to save something she cannot.

Meanwhile, in Somerset, Stephen Moss watches the vast murmuration of starlings over the Avalon Marshes. I look forward each year to a new addition to his bird biography series, The Wren, being a particular favourite. In The Starling, Moss is on a mission to show how uncommon the common starling is – including that Mozart thought so. Detailed scientific writing is combined with cultural history, anecdotal observation and beautiful descriptions which allow this permanently chilly person a version of birdwatching from the warmth and dryness of my home. Though I may have been persuaded that I must join the murmuration-watchers next year.   

Moving from the Somerset Levels to other flat landscapes of Britain and of Pakistan, I am looking forward to interviewing Noreen Masud about her book A Flat Place at the Clifton LitFest on 17^th November. I so admire the scope of this book which finds peaks of a sort in these landscapes, examines the lives shaped by fens and plains, and turns inwards to metaphorical flat places, describing the author’s complex post-traumatic stress disorder and the effects of colonialism on her ancestors.

In the novel The Plains by Federico Falco, translated by Jennifer Croft, inner and literal flatness are explored beautifully too. After a sudden relationship break-up, a man recounts a year in which he turns to his garden. It is January in Argentina and you can feel the dry heat at the corners of your eyes as much as his despair. Digging and planting, he begins to understand the seasons more deeply, realising like Rebanks when to wait and observe: he finds Plains Time. It is a beautiful novel asking why we love and what to do with our love.

For a rather darker environmental novel, I am immersed in Juice by Tim Winton. I say ‘immersed,’ and I am emotionally so, but, after the watery worlds of the eiders and the swampy fens, I have been thrust into a post-post-post-apocalyptic landscape of extreme aridity.

The narrator grew up living most of the year underground, the heat above being deadly. Details of a long-ago climate disaster, the resulting age of Terror and the lies fed to the next generations come gradually. I feel I am watching an epic disaster movie slowed down to an intricate ballet.  

I’m planning a return to water with Florence, Ordeal by Water by Katherine Kressman Taylor. On 4^th November 1966, the author watched the Arno rise, burst its banks and threaten the people and history of this city. She felt compelled to document the disaster and the rescue that followed. (I am toying with reading each diary entry on the appropriate day to experience the four months with her, though this requires a restraint I have not previously exhibited.)

Those needing to dive into an adventure, and a river full of alligators, must read Journey to the Sea by Eva Ibbotson. Theoretically for middle grade readers (9-12), one could certainly read it to younger children and recommend it to ‘grown-ups,’ whatever they may be.

Maia is sent to live with her only relatives, the Carters, near Manaus, Brazil. While they avoid encountering the nature, customs, and food (bugs are sprayed instantly they appear; corned beef is shipped over at great expense), Maia finds escapes from the sealed mini-England they have created, meets indigenous people, learns new languages and is soon embarking on a thrilling mission. I have been meaning to read this for years. I am so excited for everyone who has yet to read it too.

Younger readers who don’t mind giant teeth can swim safely with Lifesize Ocean Animals by Sophy Henn, a non-fiction picturebook full of the spiny, the tiny, the huge and the gelatinous of our oceans. Those wishing to stay on land with a board book may rather enjoy, Animals Brag About Their Bottoms by Maki Saito. I think that’s self-explanatory.

Next week we travel in time with Ben Garrod at his Tobacco Factory Theatre show, Ultimate Dinosaurs. We’ll be there with piles of Ben’s books on extinct species, not to mention the books his dog has written too, enjoying this interactive, educational show.

Astonishingly time will have raced forward into November when I next write to you and so I warmly invite you to our end-of-year Poetry in Herons party. Carrie Etter will be joined by ten guests for a reading, time will stand still as we find poetry in herons together, a rhizodont may or may not grimace from the depths, and I’m going to raise a glass to another year in books.

May your weekend offer the quiet, fierce love of a Norwegian duck woman,
Lizzie

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