Review of Gorwelion Shared Horizons

GORWELION SHARED HORIZONS REVIEW

From Caroline Bracken for ‘Nation Cymru’

https://nation.cymru/culture/poetry-roundup-all-life-is-here-love-sex-death-humour/

Three books for review this month from the consistently excellent Parthian Books. First up, an anthology of writing about climate change Gorwelion: Shared Horizons edited by Robert Minhinnick. A selection of prose and poetry by writers from Wales, Scotland and India who were invited to write about their immediate surroundings, its history and future.

The effect of these personal witnessings is to make the climate crisis real and close rather than a massive remote event we can do nothing about. Sampurna Chattarji selected and edited the contributions of the Indian writers which are particularly stark including her own: ‘She whispered as she fingered the green bedspread that was all that remained, reminded of habitat’ (Last She Looked) and from Aditi Angiras’s That Thing with Feathers: ‘They say that before colour began to disappear, Dilli was dream-like. A disco in the trees, birdsongs in the evening light. Now all I want from the future is the past. To unearth a thousand lakes, a couple hills, a river and a beating heart.’

The Welsh landscape is well represented by many writers including Tree Tai Chi by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch to Beyond Coal by Phil Cope and Airbrushed Fields: Newport’s Glebelands by Laura Wainwright. Maggie Haggith* and Stewart Sanderson show us the view from Scotland.

If, like me, you find the enormity of the climate crisis hard to get your head around, this anthology will make sense of it, beautiful writing from beautiful places worth fighting to save.

I will leave the last word to Tishani Doshi, from her piece Keeling Towards Water: ‘Birds and gods can travel between homes, but coastal communities can’t. What happens when one home is lost? What happens when you only have one home?’

 

*Note From Robert Minhinnick, editor: Parthian’s only error was to call ‘Mandy Haggith ’ Maggie'. I saw the corrected proof but mistakenly they printed the mistake.