The Landscape Aslant

Like landscape, there is really
nothing to be said about angels, or
poetry. They always already own their
own meaning. Words slide off. Aslant.

(‘How to see angels’, A Cranic of Ordinaries)

Eliza O’Toole has a lot to say about landscape in A Cranic of Ordinaries and Buying the Farm, and I have some things I want to say about her poetry, so I feel the need to match her ability to let words slide off. Leading the reader through the East Anglian countryside, O’Toole strikes a delicate balance between working the land and letting it work her, finding its meanings always already there but raking them into alignment. She openly formulates a pastoral poetics while putting it into practice, as above, and stated more explicitly towards the beginning of Buying the Farm: ‘Poetry: a naming and a making of names, an intercellular bridge, a disassembly’ (‘Field (n.) (v.)’). O’Toole elaborates in an article for the Poetry School how language ‘can perform lexically the linguistic heritage of (for me) this countryside as a unified whole’.¹ I’m a student of J.H. Prynne’s etymological poetics and linguistic syncretism, so I was predictably drawn to O’Toole’s description of working with ‘old editions of vocabularies, dictionaries of Old English, dictionaries of etymologies, or damp prayer books loitering under pews in local churches’.² Add to that list herbals, poetry from Virgil to Wallace Stevens and articles from scientific journals, and you start to get a picture of the wordhoard O’Toole cultivates. By tracing the contours of her linguistic landscape, I want to draw out some of ...