Peter Larkin’s Seven Leaf Sermons, with artwork by Rupert Loydell, was released August 2020. Here, Harriet Tarlo and Emma Mason reflect on the sequence.
Harriet Tarlo
“Trees won’t be miracle-filled, but can be leaf-willed”: so begins Peter Larkin’s Seven Leaf Sermons, proceeding as is common in his work through a series of statements and questions which prod the reader into alive and active questioning about the lives of trees. In the small act of hyphenating two words, ‘leaf’ and ‘willed’ Larkin asks what we might believe about the possible (‘can be’ not are) mind, spirit, will, of trees or their associations, parts and wholes - leaves, roots, forests, rain, light and dark. Always, the relational, also, often with dry wit, a casting of allusions between the wider more-than-human world and our own preoccupations, perceptions and moralities. The philosophical element reminds me of Thomas A Clark. The hyphenation and moments of tenderness, ‘starry pause-alongs of time’ evokes Barry MacSweeney - perhaps surprising to associate Larkin with such a passionate poet. But it is important to note that Peter Larkin is not just a dry monastic figure, clever with forms, sentences and ideas, as I think he is sometimes seen. He is a poet alive to the beauty of sonic patterns and pairings (‘trust insurrectional’; ‘green machine’), knowing well that such lines reach in their awkward, jagged beauty beyond the mere think-able into the world of feeling, spirit and co-existence that he explores in these ‘sermons’. This seems to be particularly true here, where he is working within restraints, a ten-word line established by Rupert Loydell. The two-stanza ten and five line element of the form he chooses to start and end in, but to break with in the body of the book, embodying perhaps the possibility of greater densities of proliferating leaf patterns. This book, its monochrome tempered with Loydell’s folial colours, shapes and abstractions, would be a great introduction to Larkin if you don’t know him, and a lovely addition to your collection if you do.
Emma Mason
In his book, Nature’s Fabric: Leaves in Science and Culture, David Lee notes that the ‘green tinge’ with which the Earth seemingly glows when viewed from outerspace is due to a ‘layer of leaves’ that covers the surface: 39 billion tons of leaves every year (‘about the same as our extraction of petroleum’, Lee writes*). Lee shares with Einstein the belief that immersion in the details of the universe offer a ‘cosmic religious feeling’, one affirmed by the experience of the leafy fabric that paves the way for all life. Yet his study also expresses anxiety about our ability, will, and capacity to reverse the climate change that threatens our connection to the natural world because of the disconnect between human and other-than-human. Few writers conceptualise this relationship as carefully and complexly as Peter Larkin. His spell-binding Seven Leaf Sermons is an example of Larkin’s mesmerizing imagining of our reconciliation with earth’s diversity. Reading it reshapes both our perception and reception of the complex cellular organization of leaves, their branching venations and autotrophic magic. The poems offer language through which to witness how leaves move within their communities (‘a leaf hovers only beside neighbouring / leaves’), relate to the weather (‘The sound of rain is its light rattle, rinse sonics / of dust down each veining canal’), and speak to each other (‘Sprout branches mouthing oak, pre-human to the last speech’).
But these poems, almost extended sonnets, are also sermons. Leaf being and form—a ‘throng’, a ‘palmate’, a ‘sea of givings’—is revealed as a spur for meditative and collective thought. Leaves become are a gathering for the divine, holding out their infinite fabric to humans unable to see what paradise can: ‘Leaves endlessly unachieved profferable, so paradisal what gleans into them’ (‘Leaf Sermon 4’). By the sixth sermon, Larkin stresses the ‘pre-human’ and ‘primitive’ aspect of the leaf as a way to ‘inhabit’ its ‘prayer-scrawl’ and ‘Liturgical fan’, phrases that intimate a gentle, ‘low energy’ leaf motion at once ‘weak’ and vital. For Larkin’s line ‘Lobes cue / poor light, “abide weak absorption” goes for path-lengthening direct’ draws us into the detail of leaf life, the way in which its rounded petal margins experience light as dappled and scattered because of the air spaces between its cells. This in turn elongates or lengthens the surface across which they absorb light waves and so produce pigments: they are ‘green machines’ that help us to understand light, colour, oxygen, temperature, and the things of which our world is made, atoms, protons, neutrons, isotopes. Such nuance Larkin draws directly from Lee’s study, and echoes of Nature’s Fabric resound through these poems as invitations to empirical analyses that are in turn illuminated by Larkin’s tangled variations. As he writes in ‘Leaf Sermon 7’, in charting the being of the leaf, we find our way ‘towards an alphabet of shelter’ in the haecceity or thisness of these photosynthesising engines and their modelling of connection as an ‘overspill’ that ‘inseparably joins’ each leaf ‘with every future germination’. Like the cup that overflows in Psalm 23, Larkin’s leaf is always enough, elaborately if impenetrably content in the green pastures it creates.
*David Lee, Nature’s Fabric: Leaves in Science and Culture (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), see especially chapters 3 (‘Green Machinery’), 4 (‘Nature’s Fabric’), and 11 (‘Colour’).
Emma Mason is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and co-editor of the New Directions in Religion and Literature series. Emma’s books include Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford University Press, 2018) and forthcoming Weird Faith in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Theologies at Work, co-written with Mark Knight.
Harriet Tarlo is a poet and academic at Sheffield Hallam whose books include Gathering Ground (Shearsman, 2019) and Field (Shearsman, 2016). Harriet was also the editor of the influential anthology of radical landscape poetry The Ground Aslant (Shearsman, 2011).
Seven Leaf Sermons is available HERE for £5.