Weighing the landscape: a review of Jos Smith's Subterranea (Arc Publications, 2016)

Jennifer Wong reviews Jos Smith's first book.

Incisive and philosophical, Smith’s debut poetry collection, Subterranea, is concerned not so much with painting the natural landscape as with questioning our responsibility for it, as he interrogates the delicate ecological balance and the relevance of cultural geography in the contemporary world.

In ‘Landscape interrupted’, Smith traces the movement of a deer in a land endangered by ‘ionizing radiations’. A native inhabitant of that land, the deer no longer feels safe. The interrupted syntax and the uneven number of lines in each stanza suggest that the entire ecological environment is on the brink of collapse, where the dark habitat of the deer remains a territory ‘to be derived / from the economic development’. 

Other than the power of his evocative imagery, Smith’s work reveals great sensitivity for language, and makes us reflect how hard it is to nail down with satisfaction the history and legacy of the land. A vast bog deep in the heart of Dartmoor, Grimpen Mire is a place of wild beauty, a name that immediately recalls Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s major detective Sherlock Holmes classic, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Smith depicts and measures the land by the people’s livelihood in the countryside, where they overcome ‘hail-bitten days, herding, nutting, tired / to the bone from milking out a harder life than this’. At the same time, he believes in the regenerative power of Nature, its ‘legacy of care / keeping family after family, keeping us, alive.’

Some of his more experimental poems in the collection, such as ’Tiresias at the Galway Institute for Environment, Marine and Energy’, offers a way to understand the cost involved in industrialisation or the progress of civilisation’: 

They are shucking the skin of an ocean,

leaving it to play across the panel-beaten west, 

for this, a trickle of data, a current roping in, 

pulse by pulse, across the sea-floor toward them.

In his poem, Tiresias, the blind prophet from Greek mythology, appears only to ask the king to ‘pay up’ in order to meet the imminent need for ‘real money’, totally oblivious of what it may cost the environment and its inhabitants.

In ‘Parish Map’, a woman presses buttercup petals onto the map to register her own encounter with the land, adding annotations ‘in pen and ink’ on the map in response to her neighbours’ stories and memories. At the same time, she fears that the arrival of a new Tesco would replace ‘an image of the hill [that] means so much to her’. The act of pinning down one’s memories and evolving relationship with the land becomes an intimate way of mapping the place and of articulating one’s history of lived experiences.

Through meticulous imagery and a nuanced language, Smith’s work interrogates the delicate balance inherent in the natural environment, suggesting the real, lurking ecological threat caused  by men, while at the same time conveys his belief in the forgiving, transformative power of nature. For him, the environment is a nourishing source of comfort and constancy, but it is also perpetually changing and renewing itself despite human influence or, at times, interference.

Born and raised in Hong Kong and currently in the UK, Jennifer Wong is a writer, researcher, and translator. She is soon to complete her critical/creative PhD at Oxford Brookes.