Earth Day 2024: A Poem and Commentary by Gill Horitz

Image credit: Gill Horitz.

PLIOSAUR

COMMENTARY

When I think about my approach to writing the more-than-human, I remember Barry Lopez’s commentary about experiencing landscape, ‘To have the land around you like clothing. To engage in a wordless dialogue with it’ , and the suggestion of land as ‘an animal that contains all other animals, is rigorous and alive.’[1] I think , ‘Yes! I live in that land, and will never feel absent.’

I associate the Isle of Purbeck with its 185 million year history of rocky provinces, as a ‘home’ landscape, though twenty miles from my house. I think of myself there as a familiar but at the same time as peripheral, a speck moving down the chalk path to Winspit Quarry and back up through the grazed turf of Seacombe Bottom, imagining ‘a rhythm indigenous to this land’. Heart pounding on the upward slope, I sense being diminished into a still part of the place, and yet incorporated.’[2]

But approaching the poem, ‘Pliosaur’, I held my own concerns before me like dowsing rods. Landslides have always occurred along the Jurassic coast but following torrential rain more beaches and coastal walks are threatened, and favourite walks become impassable. The landslip which revealed the pliosaur made me imagine momentarily a pissed-off cliff face dumping its hidden stuff to disturb complacent visitors – get a load of that, then!

The discovery of the pliosaur drew global media attention, the size, the state of preservation – thousands flock to the Etches Collection Museum, Kimmeridge, to see the skull. Once the pliosaur’s head was ingeniously removed people wanted more – we want the body. If we can form a crowd of funders to extract this ancient creature, how might we collectively dig ourselves out of our predicament, and what might we achieve to affirm and preserve the non-human?

[1]  Lopez, Barry, Arctic Dreams.

[2] Lopez, Barry, Arctic Dreams.

You will find a Google word doc accessible version of this feature here.

With thanks to the Poetry School.

Gill Horitz lives in Dorset, UK, close to trees.  Through community theatre she explores new tellings of local stories and landscapes, using archives and sense of place. Her poetry has been published in various magazines, and her pamphlet All The Different Darknesses was published by Cinnamon Press.