Diluvian Discontents

Peter Reading's –273.15 – absolute zero in degrees Celsius – comes close to boiling point in its tirade against our ignorance of and unresponsiveness to climate change and impending environmental disaster. Though figured similarly, the relationship between art and anger is not that of Donald Davie's To Scorch or Freeze (1988), where the Old Testament God of Wrath is fearfully evoked. God is mocked in Reading's collection, through his vaudeville version of the original eco-warrior, Noah, or 'Noye' (after the medieval miracle plays, which also cast the character in a comic light), and through his parodies of Smart:

For I will consider my cat Tikka: For she is an atheist; For she does the eight rolly-polly in the mornings; For this is the manner in which she chooooses To express her gratitude and affection; For she will leap upon the volumes Heaped upon me by the TLS for review And knock them all asunder . . . For she doth remark that 'In Egypt we was Sacred and all that'; For she doth consider how God is defunct . . . For she hateth the notion of God, preferring physics.

His recourse to other scientific and pseudo-scientific vocabularies and discourses further puts the atheistic cat amongst the pious pigeons, along with the many other species ornithologically catalogued. Yet these too are sources of credulity, crowned, in one instance, by the invocation of a defunct Christ: 'and didya read how them rain forests is burnin 6,000 acres an hour | – that's 1.6 acres per second, Jeez!' We are asked to 'consider the geopolitical implications. | And consider the urgency of underwhelmed societies, the haves | and have nots', much as Tikka or Jeffrey do consider, but to spend time thus considering is to neglect the urgency of these issues. Redressing this, 'the accelerating pace | Of melting Antarctic glaciers' is matched by the pace the poem (if poem it be) demands of its reader; this is not the sort of writing that can be readily savoured, and more than that, it points to what is politically distasteful about such a leisured perspective. Likewise, we need to 'consider . . . the cooling of much of Europe and | the U.S.' alongside the peremptory parenthesis that follows, which mimics a schoolteacher losing his cool, demonstrating the effects of global warming at the level of the performative: '[You, at the back, should've sat up and fuckingwell paid | attention]' ('OK!, OK!, OK!, | Keep yer wool on, Noye!', a later voice rejoins.)

The failure, here, to observe the proper formalities, and to maintain an appropriate register before his audience, is analogous to the predicament of the poet for whom poetry, in the current climate, may seem something of an endangered species itself. Poetic forms, where they are retained, consort with Reading's parodic purposes. Elsewhere, they are seen to succumb to the imperatives of prose, as when a trite nature elegy, of the kind that Reading is wary of lapsing into, is denied the lineation its 'puerile Keatsesque' rhythms and rhymes require. If anything the poetic line appears distinct from the prosaic, less because of its lesser extension, and more because of its over-brimming, its wings clipped by the far edges of the page in several of the sections:

and the U.S. could become colder and drier if that happened, cientists hav detected disquieting trends: 3% to 4% of the Arctic ice cap melted per dec Arctic's largest ice shelf broke up near Ellesmere Isla releas an ice-dam,

The text breaks up, taking its place on the shelf; it still gives meaningful shape to the page, though the vistas of white space often underlying it sound the 'creak of packed snow underfoot', an omen of the 'deepfreeze' to come. In a book of many numbers, and minus numbers, page numbers are conspicuously absent from these spaces, which makes us wonder how, in the event of things falling apart, they could be pieced together. And not for want of trying: Reading takes on the role of poet as 'ragpicker' that Walter Benjamin attributed to Baudelaire, his characteristic...