Poem Of The Week: 'Mountain' By Polly Atkin

Grasmere - Image courtesy of Pixabay.

Mountain

Scar on the skin of the land, hypertrophic, memory
of conflict, buckled and thickened by a difference
in process, grown out of accident, formed
out of pain. It says: this is where it hurt,
once, a long time ago, Earth
could have forgotten. Stone remembers.
Two worlds met here, connected, pressed
into one another, became something other.
Surrendered futures. They say:
this is where it hurt, when it happened,
and for a long time after. Sometimes
it still does. This is why we call them Fell.
Fateful, suspicious. Like all resurfacing
of selves we thought we had buried.

The birthing of mountains, like the calving of icebergs, is an anthropomorphic indicator of pain, giving organic life to the slow, insensate process of what Wilfred Owen called the ‘groyning’ of the landscape, into the monumental vision we now see on bank holiday Lake District weekends, or titanic Victorian canvasses in the National Gallery.

An inhabitant of Grasmere, Polly Atkin views the titular mountain at the level of water, a perspective no doubt conferring increased grandeur on its form. Atkin is a wild swimmer whose own pain is reflected in the mirror of the lake: the essence of her poems lies in the amniotic depths that yield freedom from the incarceration of debilitating ongoing illness, and abandonment to the sharpest and most immediate of animal senses.

But ‘Mountain’ is a revelation: a sonnet whose definition of the ‘agonies’ of tectonic uplift is translated into a palpable metaphor for human suffering, gives notice, also, of the poet’s own preoccupation with her Romantic heritage and the Sublime, in an entirely fitting, precipitous landscape. For Atkin gives dynamic vigour to the seeming inertia of the fells, raising them like hypertrophic scars in an overworked heartland, and investing the ancient rock with a species of memory, of the pain of birth and transfiguration: ‘this is where it hurt, when it happened’.

The galvanic irruption of rock and the ‘resurfacing / of selves’, are two sides of an unexpected, perhaps inevitable, process, but there may, as Julian Turner found in Desolate Market, be consolation in the dynamism of displacement, in the phenomenon of human and geomorphic re-birth.

‘Mountain’ is taken from Much With Body published by Seren. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher.

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