Sarah Fairbairn reviews an ‘unflinching’ collection of poetry on the threat posed by climate change
The introduction to JP Seabright’s unflinching collection of works relating to the Covid pandemic and the 2021 IPCC report on the impact of global warming imagines future generations looking back on us from a post Anthropocene world; that is, an epoch after the impact of human activity has become geologically catastrophic.
The poems themselves, spare and interrupted as they are, reflect the voice of an author whose terror at the rapidly escalating consequences of climate change is only equalled by their horror at the scale of our societal indifference to the evidence mounting before us.
The chapbook is ingeniously presented as the work of a future incarnation of Seabright themself. The introduction is written by an editor seriously and painstakingly examining the found pieces of literature extant from before some cataclysmic climate event.
Humanity has been left to piece together the evidence from before ‘the Fall’, unsure how and why such a terrible and apparently foreseen disaster can have been allowed to happen.
The poems are fragmented, interrupted and mysterious. As Seabright’s namesake writes: “It is difficult to provide accurate dates for a period commonly known as the New Dark Ages.” The poems are collected from various projects and commissions and reading them together creates a sense of a world reconstructed.
Some pieces, such as Birds Fly Backwards document an unfamiliar and frightening reality, describing the smell of ether and burning leather, while others, like Denouement, speak with an intensely personal and pained voice. There’s a sparseness to the verse that simultaneously communicates the urgency of a falling planet and the helplessness of a writer who can only watch as the world burns around them.
The collection presents these poems as ‘fragments’, stating “only four of the texts here are considered complete… Where words are missing or indecipherable due to water or fire damage, they have not been added to the text; but presented ‘as found’.”
This device is most effective in the texts included as the purported appendices, where an excerpt from the 2021 United Nations Climate Report is reimagined as a Cassandraic prophecy of the doom about to befall humanity. Reflecting on the dire warnings of ‘irreversible loss’, ‘heavy precipitation’ and ‘frequency of droughts’, Seabright’s editor is bemused.
Fragments Before the Fall was published in December 2023 by Sunday Mornings at the River and is available for purchase on Amazon
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