Book review: Bog Witch by Mab Jones

Jon Gower

Here’s a book that ploshes and splashes and fair brims with life. Here, too is an author who isn’t afraid to get her feet wet as she explores the muddy fecundity and biodiversity of wetlands, not least the ones near her south Wales home.

But it’s also a book about the healing properties of such places, offering sustenance and balm and succour to someone working through the effects of being abused by her father. So, a book brave in so many other ways and shot through with enough wisdom to countermand the pain and shame and blame. It’s a book that makes you angry at times because of the cruelty and profligacy of a man and of mankind.

Bog Witch takes as its epigraph the ingredients’ list of the three witches’ cauldron in Macbeth, such as eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog while the volume then goes on to tell us more about each of them. In this sense it’s like a piece of extended literary criticism, teasing out meaning from Shakespeare and offering context.

Or more accurately feminist eco-criticism, especially the trenchant musings on old women and how they are unkindly portrayed as old bats or batty even as the ‘voice of old woman Earth’ has been steadfastly or stubbornly ignored.

‘She’s been shrieking for decades, if not a couple of hundred years,’ Jones informs us and we ‘know what we are going to do to the body of our old mother, as her veins grow sluggish with sewage, and her water tables are laden with pollution…’

Fascinating

But this is not precious or dessicated analysis, it is full of fascinating stuff, such as the fact that eels were once used as currency and the belief that druids in Wales would wear an amulet, the Glain Neidr ‘which could only be found amongst a gathering of adders, usually in spring and most particularly on May Eve. This stone is glassy smooth, with a hole in it whicb some tales say is made by the adder’s tongue, others by the sting in the tail.’

Bog Witch is full of interesting insights into wildlife such as bats and owls and snakes as well as plant list which might be found poems – such as bogbean, pillwort, brooklime, loosestrife, lesse spearwort, common water crowfoot, spiked water-milfoil and rigid hornwort, names that ‘spike the tongue as they spike us underfoot; they sound more like the true names of demons than of innocent flora…’

It is peppered with references to popular culture, from films such as Labyrinth, Gone With the Wind and ET to songs by Paul McCartney and poems such as the forever uplifting Mary Oliver. And, as you would expect there are poems by Jones herself, such as this bright little gem:

The green skin of the frog,

thin as thumbnail, holds inside

a heart as red as a volcano.

A tiny ruby, wrought within

an emerald, sitting, just there

upon the crystal of the world.

Sobering

That world is under threat, not least its wetlands, used as sinks or dumps or simply areas to be drained and reclaimed for housing or industry. One of Bog Witch’s more sobering statistics is that, in the UK, ‘we’ve lost 90% of our wetland habitats in the last 100 years.’

The book properly reminds us of Welsh examples of recent and ongoing threats to wetlands, from routing the M4 through the Gwent Levels and the permanent inundation of the muddy estuaries of the rivers Taff and Ely behind the Cardiff Bay Barrage, which Jones suggests is an attempt to civilize the ‘hell-broth’ of ‘dirt, ooze, and unkempt chaos’ by land reclamation and development.

In so doing, Jones avers we lose the wetland’s ability to cleanse water of pollutants, hold carbon, control erosion and protect against floods.

Cornucopia

This is not a book that can be easily pigeon-holed, even if the back cover suggests it belongs on the shelf marked ‘Mind, Body and Spirit.’ It’s far fuller a cauldron than that, a veritable cornucopia of stories and concerns, healings and revealings, even if it touches upon each part of that trinity.

The abiding quality of the book is its honesty in writing about trauma and the part that poetry, and now nature played in helping Mab Jones along life’s way, which was often rocky and strewn with challenges and obstacles.

There were times when she almost gave up entirely but Bog Witch offers ample testament of the resilient spirit of this singular author, who has fully immersed herself in the magic of wetlands and their frogs and grebes. In exploring in the mud, the reeds and the boggy margins she has found out that ‘nature isn’t our ‘mirror’ – it is Life, Life itself, in vital, vivid, vivacious and very varied form, and we are a part of it, not outside of it looking in.’

Bog Witch is certainly full of life, fair brimming with it, the words wriggling like tadpoles, its warning notes booming like so many bitterns.

Bog Witch: a semi-mystical immersion into wild wetland habitats: their myths, magic and meaning by Mab Jones is published by Moon Books.