The More Than Human Perspective in Environmental Poetry: A Poem and Interview with Susie Wild

Interview by Zoë Brigley

Welcome back to our series on writing the #MoreThanHuman. We offer a set of interviews with poets and writers on how they approach writing about the environment. The more-than-human is a phrase that seeks to side-step traditional nature-culture dualisms and draw attention to the unity of all life as a kind of shared commonwealth existing on a fragile planet. It also reminds us humans that there is more to life, that there is more world, than the human. It relocates us in relation to the mystery.

This week we meet Susie Wild, author of the poetry collections Windfalls and Better Houses, the short story collection The Art of Contraception listed for the Edge Hill Prize, and the novella Arrivals. She tells us she lives in Rhondda Fach “with a TBR pile almost as high as Llanwonno”.

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How confusing the world is in daylight

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Zoë Brigley: So maybe you could start by telling us a bit more about your relationship with nature as a writer generally. It turns up in your poems regularly, and you have written some moving poems about interacting with nature during the pandemic lockdown. How do you feel about nature now?

Susie Wild: Well, I haven’t gone off it yet! I enjoy visiting cities but I spent most of my childhood in Devon and Cornwall, in villages, on creeks and at the edges of small towns by the sea – a lot of time walking and playing in woods, in fields and on beaches – and three years ago we moved out from Cardiff to Rhondda Fach where I can watch the blood moon rise over Llanwonno from our kitchen steps, or hear the resident Tawny Owl when I’m nestled in my reading chair in the lounge.  Although I am much further away from the sea than I’d like, I appreciate walks around the lakes at Clydach Vale and Dare Valley country parks, the slow breath of St Gwynno Forest, and getting perspective climbing Llanwonno, or driving over Maerdy mountain and the Bwlch.

There was a lot in Windfalls about noticing the everyday, the small things in our backyards, the joyous surprise of nature, from stumbling upon a Handkerchief Tree in bloom in Cardiff’s Bute Park to the pleasure of growing your own vegetables, and the disasters as a novice gardener, the rotten bad luck, bad weather, bad timing. Shared pandemic experiences to mask the collective trauma; a slowing down. Perhaps I’m in my bird era of writing poems now, part of the poet life cycle, although nature features a lot in my first collection Better Houses too – cats, snails, slugs, grebes, coots, elderflowers and more. Certainly I don’t seem to be done with winged things and taking flight whether bees or comets, witches or moths.

Travel also brings new birdsong to identify, new creatures at eye level to your balcony like the bat in this poem, or in the backwaters around you. I spent a month in Goa last year but I’m as interested in the murmuration of jackdaws undulating above my head on my hill here at dusk as I am in the bellowing water buffalo calling her herd. There are some poems, like this one that I have written down, and a lot of poem sketches I’ve yet to write up. Winged and wingless things: sleek Asian water monitors, cantankerous elephants, egrets, regrets.

Zoë: Your poem starts with a very personal, human thought in the title, but then shifts outward to explore the world from a bird’s eye view. It reminded me of something Ann Cahill wrote in her book Overcoming Objectification, where she warns against seeing the world only as a reflection of ourselves – our thoughts, fears, or desires. When I read your poems about nature, I often feel a balance between human experience and the natural world. Do you think about that balance when you write?

Susie: I don’t think that I do consciously, but I often go to nature to think. Even if it is just opening the kitchen door on a busy desk day and taking a minute. But it’s there, even in that view. The curving terraces and the green. Life bursting and blooming together. One of our fences was torn down by Storm Bert and we haven’t replaced it yet; it stares back – an open wound.

Some mirroring was also going on in the making of this poem – this tiny bat that landed, wing-broken. on our balcony on the same week that my husband fell and broke his ribs; that meant I was outside alone to have this first encounter while he was resting inside. It was April 2024 and we were on the cusp of the change in season, hot and humid. There were election curfews with changing rules and regulations leaving everyone a bit confused day to day in Agonda. It was a year of elections – more than 60 across the globe, around half of the world’s population – and the lead up to the general election in the UK. There was a real feeling of unrest, of change. I’m not sure any of this remains in the final draft of the poem, but I think the mood it was written out from is in that title.

I weave between these myriad threads of our existence, trying to decipher, to understand, to extract meaning. I often write from something feeling off-kilter and perhaps trying to restore some balance, or some insight from that. What can I glean from this situation? What can I share from it? If I see it slant, will you too? And these days the world always seems to be off-kilter, doesn’t it?

Zoë: Something else that I appreciate is the joy in nature in this poem. There is a beautiful simplicity in it, and it reminds me again that often we ignore the natural world and do not see wonder in it. I had hoped that after the pandemic lockdown, people might be open to how incredible even the most common plants and creatures are, but I wonder if we have just returned to the same mindset as before it all happened. Is it then important for us as writers to maintain this sense of wonder and joy?

Susie: I think it is important to me to maintain wonder and joy, but it isn’t the easiest thing to do, especially in today’s climate – political, emotional, actual. The hard times, bad luck, wrong turns. Fires blaze, both wild and deliberate, across the Valleys, dazzling and infuriating. This instinct to destroy? And we are observing so much more devastating destruction across the globe in wars and escalating natural disasters and the tantrums of tyrants. How can we take all that darkness in and still create? Yet at home in Wales, whatever is happening around us, nature is still here to ground us.

People and places remain fascinating to me, even as I get older and a bit more jaded each year. Life, it is absurd and messy and wonder-filled. Perhaps this is just the classic survivor mentality, resilience, blind rose-tinting of bad situations. I doubt the planet would say it is living its best life right now. But, side-stepping my next existential crisis, these unexpected encounters with the little things – visiting creatures, rare sightings – they help me find a balance of some kind. I hope more can find the joy in it, whether they seek it or not.