Buying the Farm

<p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Eliza O'Toole's landmark work is much more than a 'word-hoard' of and around the farmland of East Anglia the territory of Constable and Gainsborough. This is an angular book of linguistic inventiveness and substance at once multilingual and polyphonic employing different registers to accommodate a divergent range and depth of agricultural botanical lepidoptera historical and etymological knowledge. Each poem is in the present with an imposing sense of the past being visible within a mutable natural world. This is a mapping of place that digs deep down into the biochemistry and fragility of the land wildlife plants insects animals and farming life. In its slant investigation of the layered traces of time worked into the land it considers whether current farming practices are obsolete by asking obliquely 'can the land afford a farm' or 'has the farm already been bought'? As a lexical analogue of the land it delivers a vibrant messy stricken world of polychronic becomings. This is an extraordinary achievement. -David Caddy</span></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>In their density their rawness and in their brilliant uses of the English language as a ground on and from which earth can be newly sung these extraordinary poems rival Manley Hopkins in their ability to enact what they describe or lament or love. -Chris McCully</span></p><p></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>In her unique and captivating voice Eliza O'Toole's new collection portrays complex legacies of farming. The poet buries deep into the vulnerable furrows of a rural setting that is her home and the lives both human and animal that depend on it. These poems question concepts of territory ownership labour and habitat across centuries where an 'aftermath' can bring new growth or devastating consequences. </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Buying the Farm</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> provides an astonishing vital recording of East Anglian landscape written in poems of agile beauty. -Rebecca Goss</span></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Eliza O'Toole is a poet of rare creative power. Her  work is revelatory and exploratory going beyond the human experience to give expression to the being of land itself - its  memory and mythology; its constitution and construction; its power and its servitude. Paradoxically despite its title this is not an elegy.  Eliza deploys the immense discourse of law and lore history and science at her command to create a new world of words with a precision tempered by profound knowledge and a playful imagination. In doing so she opens us to the depths and precarious joys of a lived world. -Moyra Tourlamain</span></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>