Swims

by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett's Swims documents wild swimming in lakes, rivers and seas across the UK, starting and ending in Burnett's home county, Devon. An evocative long poem split into chapters, Swims is interspersed with a sequence about the poet's father. This mesmerising, lyrical debut cuts a path through Britain's waterways, investigating the human impact on the natural world as well as nature's unmistakable effect on us.

Genres: Poetry, Nature

64 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2017

About the author

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is an author and academic whose creative and critical work has a largely environmental focus. Publications include the poetry collections Of Sea (2021) and Swims (2017), both from Penned in the Margins; nature writing memoir The Grassling (Penguin, 2019) and monograph A Social Biography of Contemporary Innovative Poetry Communities: The Gift, the Wager and Poethics (Palgrave, 2017). She is a Leverhulme Research Fellow (2021-2), researching ‘Creative Writing and Climate Change: Developing a New Wetlands Literature,’ a nature diarist for Oh magazine and the Guardian, founder of Grow Your Own Creativity and Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Northumbria University.

Reviews

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This sequence of poems explores river-swimming as a way to honour nature and to reintegrate oneself with the natural world. Swimming is a political act, a way of expressing the need for nature and the grief at losing the natural world. The sequence is also an exploration of a personal journey, travelling from river to river, and dealing with personal loss and family ties. The language of the poems begins in a place of disintegration, with long, staccato pieces, that resist form. It feels almost as though the language is becoming one with the river, and the poet is losing the shape of words to water. At first, I found this a little off-putting: the language resisted interpretation, and sometimes I felt unmoored by it. But as the sequence developed, it all clicked: the later poems made the early ones easier to understand, and the different parts of the sequence work together as a whole. Later on, the form reflects the poet coming to a personal relisation within the water, and language becomes more defined, and poetic forms make an appearance, including sonnets and triolets. These regular rhythms and rhymes also reflect the movement of water, and Burnett masters the forms exquisitely. Many poetry sequences ask to be reread and studied again and again, and often I intend to do this but find there are too many demands on my time -- however, in the case of Swims I really want to. It's a joy to get lost in it.

[Merry · Rating 3 out of 5]

More a 3.5, I think?
I always find poetry hard to rate, so I don't think it's a surprise this isn't a five star read, either. I do appreciate this collection on an intellectual level and found the themes, concepts, and use of language fascinating, but I did find it hard to make sense of a lot of the poem(s), so I'm a bit hesitant to say I loved it.

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“All through the night I twitch my heart. / Swimming is a kind of hiccup / that jolts the body clean apart.” In Swims, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett composes a long poem through recounting twelve swims, moving across water from England to Wales and back, starting and finishing in Devon’s Teign and Dart rivers respectively. The sequence is interrupted somewhat part-way through by three poems written for Burnett’s father, which deviate from the swimming structure while reframing her relationship with the water. Formally varied and experimental, and spun with such lyrical mastery, this debut collection is a gorgeous love-letter to swimming, an ode to what the water can do for body and spirit.

[jade · Rating 4 out of 5]

'A difficult swim. A snatched one, a clipped one, from a timetable too regulated. A timetable takes something from you that is hard to recover. It believes you can be reduced to a model of yourself that is flat, made from paper or plastic, or that an online version of you can be downloaded. It believes it can work with an outline of you, with all the guts emptied out, all the mess, all human circuity' (39-40).

[Isabella Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who knew swimming could be so complex.

[Rich Law]

Fully recommend this innovative collection, which seems to envision its poems as a kind of ecological and political project. I particularly enjoyed the emerging use of rhyme schemes toward the end of the collection.