Kelptown

<p>This is poetry at the edge of the land but also at the edge of our horizon.<em> Kelptown </em>is Kemptown so we are on the south coast of England. But this is not a poetry in which borders are fixed. What we are given instead is a language of continuities lines of contact and connection that conventional place-making keeps from view. We are standing at the shore knowing that the waters are rising but knowing also that our only hope is to situate ourselves in a radically different way. Carol Watts gives us a poetry which lives and shows us how we can learn to live alongside fellow species which allows us to register again what we walk among. It is a poetry of loss and of an intense politics of loss: we are given 'DeExtinction Poems' and 'Notes on a Burning World'. But is also a poetry that knows it must 'make a home/ on friable shores built from inundate truths'. These beautiful lines are from the book's title sequence where Watts raises the Thoreau-like question: 'How do I live tenant among your long fronds'. More than ever we need our poets to help shape our answers to such questions. And Carol Watts' imaginary is a most crucial response. Written across the past decade through what can seem like the end times these are poems that open us to new relations with the world. -David Herd </p><p><br></p>