Shaler s fish helen macdonald biography

I got this difficult, dense book out of the Poetry Library several months ago, and have serially renewed it.  The poems’ fractured syntax, their language sometimes drawn from science, periodic archaisms and very unlinear shifts of thought made them hard to inhabit at first.  The more I read them, the more I wanted to, for their independence, their intelligence and the feeling of getting lost in a hail-driven landscape (or, sometimes, stuck in a thicket).

They seem to me both conceptually exciting, and down-to-earth.  That is not to say I understand them any better now, in the sense of being able to explain them, but I don’t think that is what difficult poetry is for.  I do feel I can inhabit them.  Quoting is problematic – adding to the difficulty by removing the context.  Here is the beginning of ‘Poem’: