Poetry review: This Common Uncommon by Rae Howells

Rhian Elizabeth

I really didn’t think this collection would be for me. I’m not big on nature, which makes me sound like an arsehole, I know, but I’m not.

I recently went camping for the first time in about twenty years and I absolutely hated it and cried all night, desperate for the sun to appear in the sky so that I could go home to my bed and my charging point, but I was wrong to think that these poems wouldn’t speak to me.

The collection is all about a patch of greenspace in Swansea, called West Cross Common, and in the notes before the poems we learn that this space is under threat of development. The council want to shove a load of houses on it. Why has the poet written about it, and why does it mean so much to her?

Like an oasis in a dessert, the common almost revealed itself to the poet and her family when they most needed it- during lockdown, when we were all stuck in our houses and desperate for fresh air and a break from our four miserable walls and equally miserable family members.

The poet discovered it and fell in love with it and she has made it her mission, along with others, to save it, like it saved her.

This collection spoke to me for that exact reason. I remember lockdown, and I remember how walking saved my sanity.

I live in a lovely bit of Cardiff and my favourite walking spot, a massive lush meadow, has recently succumbed to the same fate – houses everywhere, my walking route and the gorgeousness of it now reduced to concrete paths. I realise the hypocrisy, of course, as the nice new build home I live in was also once a lovely green meadow, too.

Lyrical

The collection hopes to give the West Cross Common a voice, to speak to for it as it cannot speak for, or defend, itself. The poems themselves leap from the pages just like the sky larks and blackbirds and wrens and bats and frogs they so beautifully describe, all of whom are set to lose their homes.

It is lyrical and whimsical and serious. Some of the more poignant poems use personification as a clever tool that implores you to empathise with the common by thinking of it as a mother, a woman, or to simply hear it speak as if it was able to.

The common as a woman who is stretched too thin

“… and if she keeps on, she will find herself forced

flat on her back at the end of the long path,

where the ash tree fell, looking up at stars and

singing with her greenfinch heart:

i have been burned

i am alive.”

A bat asks

“… how can you build here?

what is the appeal? how can I

wing? how can I soar? How can I reach?

how will I read their elevations?

navigate by lamplight?”

In my favourite poem we get to explore the common through the eyes and nose of Hazel The Dog.

“I can hunt

chase pieces of story

along their own lines

pant and try the air

under wings

but there isn’t enough squirrel

I would prefer the story

to always end with a squirrel.”

Salvation

In this collection there is humour, warmth, hope, fear. It is a reminder of the beauty and salvation of nature and the shittyness and destructiveness of humans. Yes, we need places to live but, in an ever increasingly ugly world, we also need to hold on to all the beauty we can.

This collection serves as a reminder of that and I hope it is widely read and gets all the praise it deserves. I hope the common is saved.

I’m not going camping again though. No chance.

This Common Uncommon by Rae Howells is published by Parthian. It is available from all good bookshops.