Local Interest

by Emily Hasler

Situated where salt and freshwater meet, where floods and fields 'mingle parts', Emily Hasler's second collection exposes the dailiness of disaster to chart the constantly shifting courses of rivers and lives.

Taking its name from the sections of libraries where much of Hasler's research began , Local Interest maps the friable and slippery landscapes of south Suffolk and north estuaries and water meadows, coastal defences and disused decoys, possible futures and forgotten pasts.

This is a book of habitats lost, created and threatened, teeming with plants, people, animals and 'legless, uneyed life'. Here are promontories, precarity and potential; the first English sea battle and a forgotten stuntman; rare and familiar birds; a fish die-off and a vanished world; a historic earthquake and continuous erosion. Moments and millennia are as muddled as the elements. In these poems nothing is pure and everything is borrowed. Language is hybrid; poems are 'stolen' and 'observed'.

Local Interest questions boundaries and belonging, squinting at ideas of invasion and migration, borders and crossings. It asks what is 'local' and to whom; how we might celebrate dwelling while looking beyond permanence and ownership.

This is poetry that wallows at the muddy edges of things, that asks you to follow it 'through every breach that was and could be'.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2023

About the author

Emily Hasler was born in Felixstowe, Suffolk and studied at the University of Warwick for a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing, and an MA in Pan-Romanticisms. She now lives in London.

In 2009 she won second prize in the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition. Her poems have appeared in various publications, including the Rialto, Poetry Salzburg, Warwick Review and Horizon Review, and have been anthologised in Dove Release, Birdbook, clinic II and Herbarium. Her poems appear in The Salt Book of Younger Poets and The Best British Poetry 2011. She is a regular poetry reviewer for Warwick Review. natural histories is her first pamphlet.

Reviews

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Life is a beach — // the point at which // the sand in the egg timer / seems to hold still.” In Emily Hasler’s second collection, Local Interest, the natural world is rendered in all its glory, its weirdness, and its precariousness. Hasler’s craft is polished and still in places playful; poems like ‘Schreckstoff’ achieve both at once, a delicate, excellent feat: “I want to hold them, and I want // them gone. I cannot smell a living / fish. Perhaps if I was fishier: all tongue, // muscle, tooth and fear. If I had the sense, / could feel the shift of things coming // or missing. If I too were born with / my armour on, it would not save me.” In ‘The Age of Coastal Sail’, the threat of climate change is palpable as a threatened absence, a gap in memory, comprehension, “Like horizons in haar. / Or the memory of a house lost to the sea. / Swollen out of shape with meaning.” The three longer poems in the collection stand out for their formal inventiveness and vividness: the breach in ‘The Flooded Field’; “land creeping / into the sea at / night limbs wandering” in ‘Starfish’; the “thousand tiny griefs burring every scene” in ‘Goosefoot’. Hasler’s work situates the self in the natural world, making us complicit not just in its slow dying but in its chances for survival. “Accretions of erosions I think, most parts. Coast is what I swim, is what I think, moving in more than one direction.“ “Before the seawall / there were a great many breaches / living peacefully in coexistence / with the tides: not land, not water”. Then there’s the joy Hasler finds in nature and our collective experience of it, “the dynamics / of the group that captivate; / the unknowable journeys / of enthusiasm.”