Weeding

by Jess Mc Kinney

In a letter in the summer of 1802, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “Nature has her proper interest, and [s]he will know what it is, who believes and feels, that everything has a life of its own, and that we are all one life.” Jess McKinney’s debut pamphlet Weeding weaves together human experience and the natural world: the joints, threads and meeting points ‘like the internet of fungus connecting the Douglas fir and paper birch’. The poems speak with an old soul, as if through our female ancestors, wise women interpreting plant-lore, herbalism, potion, omens, dreams, myth - and yet feel utterly alive, witty, close, new - turning through murmurations, swifts, wych elm, fern and deer, to colour theory, artists and photographers.

Shifting from the back fields of Inishowen, through to the inner-city streets of Belfast and Dublin, her work binds superstitions and love letters out of long grasses.

32 pages, Paperback

Published September 30, 2021

Reviews

[Matt]

I first read Jess McKinney’s debut pamphlet last year, but find it’s one of those that keeps drawing you back in, not least because McKinney has such a knack for opening lines. One of my favourites, ‘Olive’ begins ‘Licking wallpaper is never a polite way to behave…’. Boom, I find myself hooked in again and again. That particular poem goes on to explore William Morris and wallpaper – at one point stating: “I want to know what he worshipped in the hedgerow”. This poem shares a conceit with others that draws on what I think are pantone colours, as poems delve into different green shades.

All of the poems in this short collection brim with a delightful curiosity for the strangeness of things, the relationships between creatures and human creatures, plants, place, senses and sensations. Form varies, with some free verse poems working as almost mini-essays, while others take on more traditional stanza constructions. Throughout, McKinney takes the reader with her, on a variety of journeys in physical and metaphysical worlds, buzzing through each poem with insect-like interest in the various strange things encountered on the way, from the prick of gorse, to earthy tones of fern, deer emerging from shadow shapes, meditations on kisses, waders running down to the sea, or dreaming on the edge of a lake.

Always there is a sense of a curious mind and soul, finding fascinations, making connections, delighting in details or rippling outward to embrace larger questions and mysteries. A collection that is short, but deep, packed with compelling thoughts that will tug at your mind, and reel you back in.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s something in these poems that I can’t quite speak to directly. An obliqueness. I have to come at it sideways. The book is filled with things that you know are there but can’t see. There’s an extra sense about them, like standing in the woods and feeling what’s out there in the brush. I’d have liked a few more solid footholds, but that’s really on me, isn’t it?