Sentient: litany for a hedgerow

Throughout this last locked-down winter, I cultivated a close attention to the land. Down on muddied knees, I viewed up close the miniscule lichens growing on the western slopes of Selsley common, scooped up curls of birch bark from the floor of Penn Wood, rattled the honesty seeds plucked from the banks on Water Lane.

A preoccupation with the overlooked and unnoticed life of the fields and hedgerows carried me through the dark months of the healing season. I kept a diary of things I found on my daily walks. It became a kind of bearing witness, an observation of survival and in the writing of the poems that began to speak from that space, an invocation to the world around me to persist.

 The hedgerow is a concrete noun, meaning a mixed hedge of rough shrubs and trees, habitat for countless species of insects, birds and mammals and an invaluable carbon sink, potentially a vital tool for tackling the climate emergency. But the hedgerow is also an idea. Boundary between town and country, line between human civility and the feral wilderness beyond, hedgerow is a radical space where hierarchies are levelled and the natural takes its own good time. Hedgerow time is uncompromisingly slow. Hedgerow speaks an untamed language. Hedgerow is a radical practice.

Hedgerow / Hedgewitch.

The form of the poem reflects the hedgerow’s genius loci. It happens that Sentient was already written when I listened to Alice Oswald’s recent, brilliant lecture on Lines, but it reflects exactly her description of poetry that avoids knowing and categorical pronouncements. Sentient is written in what she would call ‘blackbird grammar – quick statements pursued to the point of amazement, then silence.’ The phrases of the poem are outlined by pauses, questions, a halting way of speaking.

It felt important for Sentient to move beyond the limitations of the written word to incorporate the music of a visual narrative. Inviting the brilliant artist Susie Hetherington to collaborate was both instinctive and intuitive – aside from being friends, we live overlooking the same valley that inspired the thoughts behind the poem. Susie’s drawings are a stunning celebration of the flora and fauna on our doorstep, realised in her textiles and linocut prints. More than that, the symbiosis of collaboration brushes aside the idea of the individual as author, holding close the value of the various over the singular and enabling a kind of biodiverse collectivity into the making of the piece.

Drawings in progress. Image copyright: Susie Hetherington

In its finished form, Sentient is as much an object to be felt in the hand and observed, as it is a long song made of words from the hedgerow. Widening our collaboration in working together with publisher Philip Rush at Yew Tree Press, it has transformed from a series of halting black marks on a white page, to a small concertina booklet where word talks to the line of the drawing and its length speaks of the subject. Blackbird grammar in song and form.

 You can buy Sentient direct from Yew Tree Press here. Please support this excellent independent publisher and all the wonderful things they do for artists and writers in Gloucestershire and beyond.