Floodmeadow

by Toby Martínez de las Rivas

The Floodmeadow draws us into a seething pastoral where lightning threatens and thunder gathers, pylons and powerlines hum, and steel-framed gates sing out into the wind. In these incantatory pieces, everything is present at once. The landscape, teetering on apocalypse, is characterised by collision and disintegration. Among fragments of memory and history are meticulously journaled observations of the natural the moorhen who 'with exaggerated delicacy steps / free of the reedbeds'; the dragonfly that 'pushes itself through the armour / of its body' to be born.
The world is populated by archangels and wild gods, the roar of military aircraft, hunting dogs caught permanently suspended in the chase and a car that veers from the road into the floodwater in which the whole collection is saturated. Human relations are fleeting and vulnerable, appearing in the impression of a wedding or the recurring moments captured between a father and son, who make between them delicate balsawood constructions, which - as the poems do themselves - take flight in the turmoil, ecstatic one moment, plunged into darkness the next. This is a visionary collection that invokes other times, dimensions and soundscapes to tell out some word of beauty and abundance in the here and now.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 2, 2023

About the author

Toby Martínez de las Rivas (b. 1978) grew up in Somerset, England, before moving to the North East to study and work as an archaeologist. His collections are Terror (2014) and Black Sun (2018). He has won various awards, and currently lives in Córdoba, Spain.

Reviews

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

THE MORETON RESURRECTION
What awful mind imagined a circle & imagining
a circle imagined the material
to make a circle & made a circle & placed it
in the eastern sky & set the circle
on fire & in the western sky
made a circle coloured with ice & death
& set a river rising & falling
as the circles rose
& fell?

You have come to the watershed: slurry
& snowmelt & fine Silurian grits
clouding the glass
with ash.

My body has been raised once
from the earth. The waters are rising.
The bells are ringing
under the water. (53*)

[Mab · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems aren't quite for me, too elusive in ways I'm not completely drawn in by, too tightly personal, too obscure, but I found the whole thing magnificent all the same. I think it's something like fascination at what poetry can do and be, and also deep admiration of both de las Rivas' imagery and, weirdly, his use of punctuation, which I really enjoyed.

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Our bodies have no past or future. Only this endless / present of joy or pain they undergo again & again”. Toby Martinez de las Rivas’ third collection, Floodmeadow, builds upon the work of his first two, presenting carefully crafted poems of existentialism and the environment. I enjoyed above all else ‘The Black Hours’, three poems rich in their rhythm and imagery, as well as ‘The Levels / Nothing’ (“I want there to be nothing, want you to push me / under the water & hold me there, / want to look up through the flowing glass / into your eyes & see in them / my own reflected, misplaced by parallax”), and the brilliant ‘Seething Pastoral’, a phrase which could well have served as an alternative title to the collection with its sense of dark beauty and heavy contrasts. “I dreamt a horse in the night like a running god / across a field fringed with trees; / the night like a room shaking with stars / & the dark trees swaying / as it ran through the night to the sound / of thunder; & as it ran it turned / to look back over the meat / of its shoulder; turned its slow head towards / me swaying, the field fringed / with trees - a copper beech turning silver / in the stars & the lime a spread cloak, / & a darker line at the fringe / of trees you could not see beyond.” Even at his most elusive and obscure I find it hard not to be enchanted by de las Rivas’ work, his supreme phrases, building dazzling images with clarity. “& the heron a god plunging forward / wingspread to counterbalance an infinity.” “The whole // imagined world is waiting draped / in light”.

[Helen McClory · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this partially on the bus home from the bookshop where I bought it (shout out to Argonaut books!) and struggled not to make strangulated yelling noises in public. Devoured in a gulp, and now must return at some other time to properly process the brilliance.