‘Without fields – no us. Without us – no fields.’
– Tim Dee, Four Fields

The physical borders of a particular field may be clearly defined; through hedges, fences, ditches, but the mental, the psychogeographic bounds, as the above quote suggests, takes one into slippery territory. 

Every field is an element of living landscape intricately bound-up with ourselves. Thankfully, in this pamphlet, Corinna Board makes no attempt to pin down the ‘what’ of a field. 

In her poems she’s more concerned with the fields of the tactile, of the imagination. In this way, each field is addressed more as co-conspirator, or sometimes stage, in a kind of feral dance with us. 

What Board does ask, is closer to: How should one address a field? As a poet, as a person?

Throughout this short, but deep pamphlet, the poet sets out to explore what this question may involve. 

In a frenetic media and cultural landscape, where the hot-take, the shrill point of view and the taking of sides are increasingly what grabs attention, it is enormously refreshing to join a poet in allowing the vague, the loose, the undefined to persist. 

Here, empathy, curiosity and nuance are to the fore, as Board leads us in and around a variety of fields and meadows, meeting a number of different places, creatures, plants, rivers, rocks and more along the way. Always, with a sense that this about opening up, never closing down. 

At the heart of many of the poems is the act of slowing down and simply paying attention. 

No field is exactly the same as another, so appropriately, these poetic encounters come in a range of imaginative and varied forms – as though to enable each to arrive or enter a space from a new direction or perspective. 

Many attempt to give meadows and fields a voice – through translation, direct question, or in the case of Meadow Semantics, for example, a noise, used to bring a sense of pulsing, vivid life to a field. 

In this poem, there’s a repeated ‘ee’ sound throughout – not used in a fixed rhyme pattern, but piping out at varied points: field, yield, peels, reveal, beetles, field, field, country, redefined, freed.

There’s a kind of seething, restless quality to this, which brings a sense of animated being to the piece. In my Lambeth flat, there are small, street-bound urban fields on either side of the block – always filled with crows and jackdaws, always busy, always gabbling and chattering, often including a similar, insistent ‘ee’ sound. The poem brought this to mind. 

In other poems, Board brings different techniques to create a sense of the differing character or feel of a field. Here we have erasure poetry, lists, phonetic transcriptions of bird calls, interviews – including a Q&A with a brook; another poem follows the format of a multiple-choice exam, or a choose your own adventure-style reflection, on a fox skull. There’s a blended lexicon of Old, modern and dialect English, applied in an effort to convey a Dunnock’s prayer, which lends a pleasing sense of history and depth to this land. 

Another translation involves the grass in a field. ‘What does the grass say?’ uses a series of sloped marks, to represent the voice of its subject. These look at once like blades of grass and Druidic ogham alphabets. 

The poem, ‘A short guide to noticing’, draws on footnotes to expand a brief inventory of creatures, plants and natural features, observed on a walk into a connected sequence of deftly expressed pensée. Other poems experiment with spacing, while one – ‘& then a lark’  – has letters breaking off and floating out from the main line, in a reflection of the rising ‘rope of notes’ emerging from the singing bird. 

For all the playful conceits contained in these pages; whether she interviews a brook, or asks of a field “Do you ever dream of picking yourself up and striding off over the horizon? Be honest now.”, Board is never less than serious in her explorations. 

Not least in the prose poem ‘A boy walks into a field’, which is haunted from the off by the Chekhovian mention of a shotgun. An extremely poignant meditation on a range of alternative paths or futures that may have been chosen, are traced as the poem progresses towards its quietly devastating conclusion (its impact only slightly lessened by a trigger warning).

Stimulating and engaging throughout, this pamphlet inspires in this reader and hopefully many others, both a desire to get back outside, to connect with their own local landscapes and a yearning to wander again into these poems, to uncover further well-honed lines, notes and reflections. A joyful, inventive delight. 

Mædwe
Corinna Board
Salò Press £4.99