(Photo above of Oglet Shore by Greg Quiery)
Oglet, a collection of poems by Greg Quiery based on visits to edgelands on the banks of the river Mersey.
Reviewed by Cornelia Gräbner
‘Thimbles’
Precarious in flight,
they flip and tumble recklessly
in tall reeds.
Pennyweights,
Each a thimble-full of life,
that scrambles on the verge,
resolutely clinging
to what is left.
These ‘pennyweights’ of joy inhabit the edgelands of Liverpool along the banks of the Mersey, on Oglet Shore and the Garston Nature Reserve. Poet Greg Quiery poetically celebrates them, alongside many other species and forms of life, in his poetry collection Oglet. In this book Greg takes us readers on his long walks along the edgelands of the Mersey; some of which are now under threat from corporate development.
Greg wrote Oglet during lockdowns, when he and his partner went on long walks from the Garston Nature Reserve through Speke Hall to Oglet Shore. Just before, in 2020, Greg had published his first poetry collection A Stray Dog Following, which is a selection of poems written on various occasions. Greg now wanted to try his pen at a themed poetry collection. He had heard about Oglet Shore and the Save Oglet Shore Campaign. Once he had got involved in the campaign and was regularly walking the shores of the Mersey, he set himself the challenge of writing from these few remaining wild areas, and with the creatures that inhabit them.
‘It’s a challenge to write about ecology and nature without being trite or mundane’, he says, ‘You have to get people saying “This is a beautiful area!” to convince people that they will find something that is of value, of interest. Another thing that people try to do when writing about natural areas is to put their own feelings into the writing.’ Greg’s poems are different. Where poets tend to highlight their own feelings to get readers to identify with them, Greg encourages his readers to sympathize with the natural environment and non-human creatures on their own terms. We sense the joy that Greg takes in the ‘pennyweights’, but as we imagine them tumbling about and clinging to the weeds, we find our own joy in relation to them.
Similarly, Greg gets his readers to empathise with how different people can appreciate the same space in different ways, instead of using the authority of the ‘poet’ to get readers to agree that the space is beautiful because he put this in a poem. Throughout the book we meet all sorts of people who appreciate the edgelands for all sorts of reasons: as a source of calm and solace, a space where their kids run free, for picking blackberries, to re-connect with memories of childhood, taking joy in watching the birds, looking at the plants. Each person finds their own beauty and ‘poetry’, none is like another, and this is how a community of people emerges from sharing a space and through poetry, as in the poem ‘Ted Sees.’
And as for the ‘beautiful area’: The poems show us how these very human ideas and creations of ‘poetry’ and ‘beauty’ emerge from our ability to connect with the natural environment, to feel ourselves as part of it, to love the difference of its creatures. In Oglet Shore and the Garston Reserve ‘nature’ exists for its own sake and it is beautiful on its own terms, not because it pleases us humans and complies with our expectations or desires. By getting us to see and feel this, Oglet shows us a way out of a prison we have built for ourselves: ‘We have become very focused on ourselves’, Greg tells me, ‘We are very focused on our own welfare and our own health, which is quite reasonable, but it should not come at the expense of rarely discussing the welfare of the other creatures that share the Earth with us. Those creatures have rights, and we are not respecting those rights.’
These unique edgelands are under threat, from humans who want to make them conform to their ideas of what nature should look like, or erase them altogether to build something profitable on top. In contrast to the many people who wander around Garston Nature Reserve and Oglet Shore without causing harm, corporations wage a war of destruction on nature, and a war of exclusion against those humans who does not comply with their aims, as in the poem ‘Car Park’:
Let there be border paving slabs,
Laid out in straight rows.
Let there be flat surfaces,
Gravel paths and tarmac
Straight white lines
To demarcate each parking bay,
Conforming to the modern spc,
For safari jeeps and people carriers.
And let there be a mighty fence,
To protect the sports utility vehicle
And the diesel trucks
From vandalism and wanton destruction.
That said, in Oglet that human life does not in and of itself harm nature. Even the small-scale industry in some of the old industrial sections around the Nature Reserve does not cause irreparable damage. ‘It’s certain aspects of human activity that are eroding and constantly running down the natural environment’, Greg explains when I ask him about this, ‘It is the industrial estate near the Reserve and the airport next to Oglet Shore that are really threatening this environment. Those are powerful organisations with a lot of finance behind them, and it’s very difficult to resist what they are trying to do.’
The Save Oglet Shore Campaign takes on these powerful corporations, like Peel Holding. Oglet was written as part of the Save Oglet Shore Campaign, but Greg has been careful to not use the campaign to market the book. Instead, he has used the book to bring the issues raised in the campaign to a wider audience. Oglet joins poetry and campaigning: if Oglet Shore is destroyed, all the poetry in Oglet will cease to exist as a part of life. It will only exist on the page. We will no longer be able to go there ourselves and find this joyful ‘thimble-full of life’ that brightens up our day, to meet someone who appreciates Oglet Shore for a reason we would have never thought of, or to ourselves feel ‘beauty’ instead of having it described or evoked in a poem.
Oglet is available to buy at News from Nowhere.
Greg participates in the Liverpool poetry scene and regular attends the Dead Good Poets Society as well as A Lovely Word and the Liver Bards.
In November 2023, Greg Quiery participated in an event on Poetry from the Edgelands of Liverpool and Cork, hosted by the O Bheal Winter Warmer Festival. You can watch the event, which also features Liverpool poet Eleanor Rees and Cork-based poets Matthew Geden and Mary Noonan, here: https://vimeo.com/775277923
You can contact the Save Oglet Shore Campaign on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram.
Please consider signing the petition to save Oglet Shore and stop airport expansion.