Interview by Zoë Brigley
“I think that when we have children, many of us tend to turn the natural world into fairyland for a while, and share their entrancement with it”
He tells me how trees communicate …
... calls it the Wood Wide Web. Roots threading with fungi; the modem of trees. Code for another way of living. In droughts like this, tap roots reach for water, look to trees with deep longing, wringing out earth’s secret reservoirs. I unravel too, with the sun at its extreme. The air unreachable. The ground a fractured shell. I reach out a hand and he takes it, now beyond the age for embarrassment at his mother’s shows of affection. The trees speak of it. Ash to ash. Arteries in their root embrace.
It’s funny that natural processes can seem like magic, like the idea that you are exploring here: that plants and trees communicate through their roots. If an ordinary person had suggested it fifty years ago, would people have dismissed it? Now science has approved it and it seems to be fact, and I wonder if these debates were in your mind when you were writing a poem about discovering the magic of the more-than-human with a son.
I think that when we have children, many of us tend to turn the natural world into fairyland for a while, and share their entrancement with it. I certainly did that. Of course, before you know it, the kids have outgrown such stuff and discovered the wonder of science itself, which in reality is every bit as fantastic as anything we might invent.
In terms of the communication of trees, I think that’s a subject that fascinates me particularly because my eldest son has a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Condition. It meant that verbal communication developed later for him than it did for others and even today, years later, I don’t entirely take our conversations for granted.
My son never feels the need for ‘small talk’ exactly, preferring to talk about concrete facts, the news, science, politics – things that he knows really matter. That said, he loves nonsense speak: the sounds of words and their rhythms. It’s something that we all play along with and brings us a lot of laughter. I think all of this informs how I write about him even now, as a young adult; how I think of communication has definitely changed because of him.
The poem begins in tercets, but it fractures part way through the poem, and ends with couplets. Could you tell me more about how the form emerged?
The tercets of the early verses are intended to give the metaphor (the trees and their roots and the heat of the day) room to grow, so to speak, so that when the focus shifts to the relationship between the two central figures in the third stanza, the tercets are broken at the exact moment that one hand is reaching out for the other. I wanted to show that ‘reach’ in physical terms, and the break in the line at that key moment seemed the most direct way to achieve that. The couplets of the final stanza were then a natural response to a bridging of space and time between us: the closeness resulting from two minds meeting and understanding each other.
It’s a moving moment when the son takes the mother’s hand, and I wonder if it is something that needs to be written about more: the relationships of mothers and sons, and influence that mothers can have on their sons’ development?
I’m so glad it moved you. Life with children is full of moments like that, isn’t it? I call them magic moments, which is a bit twee, but they feel like something significant. I think that what is talked about even less than the impact of mothers on sons’ development is the impact of children on adult development. We all know how our own parents were massive drivers in forming our adult selves but what isn’t widely discussed is how children become massive drivers in their parents’ wellbeing and growth. I’m interested in that: how we’re all just learning to be together, reaching out and connecting, holding out a branch and growing.
