At the Small Publishers Fair last year I caught a reading by John Bevis from A Surrey Naturalist, his new collection of eighty found poems derived from an old book by the broadcaster and conservationist Eric Parker. Afterwards I talked to John and his publisher Colin Sackett about the techniques of found poetry and the challenges of writing about the landscape of your childhood. His main method was erasure, where poems emerge from the original work by retaining only a few words, in their original order, arranged into stanzas. I liked his simple idea for 'Swifts innumerable', a poem where everything is erased but the punctuation, which floats freely on the page like swifts glimpsed in a cloudy sky. He also used a Jonathan Williams-style cutout - 'a piece of card, smaller than a postcard, with a central rectangle about the size of a matchbox removed' - and an approach inspired by stargazing where he would visually sweep Parker's pages in order to spot interesting words in his peripheral vision.
Having grown up in Brighton, I always viewed Surrey as the place you had to pass through on the way to London. John addresses the stereotypical view of Surrey in his introduction and regrets that it is 'pretty much at the bottom of the heap in terms of poetic credibility, authenticity of voice, rootedness.' It has a strong association with stories of childhood - Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie, E. H. Shepard. I remember as a teenage Tolkien fan reading Michael Moorcock's description of the Shire (in 'Epic Pooh') as 'a Surrey of the mind', and thinking how unfair it was to compare Middle Earth to a place I associated with retired bankers. However, as John points out, there were always elements of industry here and links to writers like Wells and Huxley who had darker visions of humanity. Eric Parker's book, published in 1952, covers this cultural history but also provided fresh and vivid observations of nature that John felt he could rework into poems evoking the landscape of his childhood whilst bypassing the selectivity of memory.
A Surrey Naturalist (this version but evidently the original too) varies its approach from chapter to chapter, providing different lenses on the county and its topography. I particularly enjoyed a section called 'Country Chances', the first page of which is reproduced on the Uniformbooks website. You can see there the Ian Hamilton Finlayesque 'Visitors from Sea', a brief meditation on travel in 'Thought of a Journey' and the enigmatic 'Riddles of a Lawn'. Later in the chapter there is a poem called 'Cuttings of Hazel' that turns Parker into a haiku poet: 'Difficult to choose / a carpet of snow // over a carpet / of primroses.' I will end here by quoting a poem on the Surrey landscape (sticking, as ever, to my blog's theme), from the chapter 'Rivers and Streams'. I was briefly tempted to create my own composite found poem from John's, but will spare you this further level of condensation and abstraction. You could also, I suppose, move in the opposite direction and re-imagine Parker's chapter based solely on his found texts, but the resulting descriptions would no doubt let back in that 'Surrey of the mind' we all carry around with us.
Over stones, under alders. Under oaks, dun water.
Above, the sun. More beyond.
Dried up in summer, the drought of last summer.
Dried up in spring, and dry in summer.
Heard of streams: a bubbling melody in three bars, of moaning, loud cries, whoop and whirr.
To find the source, to trace the river to a pond, to some fish, to swimming.
This photograph was taken in August last year, when I was walking with my sons by Tillingbourne in the Surrey Hills. Sunlight on dun water...
