Jos Smith's debut Subterranea seems at first to work within the heavily trodden traditions of British nature poetry, nodding to Wordsworth, Clare and Thomas. This is a book of hay, crows, clearings, roots and parishes; a book about 'Harbledown Solstice' and Taunton Dean. The opening poem has a nostalgic tone, with two lovers on their last night together compared to willow leaves 'resigned to the ebb of their season's lot'. This is not, though, a romantic book. Its best poems are about the violence humanity is committing against nature. Its interest is in posing the question: how must nature poetry adapt to our new reality?
In two separate poems ('Cothelstone' and 'Witness'), a hill and a plateau are seen as eternal observers whose work is to remember the changing landscapes, the 'paths, ponies, walkers', and 'carrying the living and the dead'. These superficially recycle the assumption of all nature poetry, from haiku to Hughes, that seasons shift but the world itself will endure. Except 'Cothelstone' is like a 'planet adrift', and 'Witness' begins with a 'latter-day Noah'. Are the changes these places will soon see of a new order? In poem after poem, the security humankind has historically taken in nature's constancy falters.
In 'The Edge of Magic', a reworking of The Tempest, Miranda walks on the beach 'knee-deep in plastic debris' and begins to wonder 'what strings have been pulled / for her good life'. Even weather becomes suspect. Her father's magis is losing its grip and the cost of his 'loose encahntment' becoming apparent. It is a powerful metaphor for capitalism, and the way it has perverted nature. Smith's central sequence, 'A Plume of Smoke', is a depiction of the 1967 Torrey Canyon oil spill that takes on a wider resonnance. The oil is 'tumor' that takes over ('You ate it you drank it you slept in it'). And the 'dark rind' can only be destroyed by more human intervention: the 'chemical rainbows' of detergents. Afterwards, we experience with the relief the 'Clean, intelligent silence / already stirring the fish below it', but there is menace in the 'heaven-shuddering green' of the unchecked algae.
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