‘Don’t ask what a work is. See what it does’. The reader of Mimic Pond, Carol Watts’s latest collection, is thus advised by this quotation from Eva Hesse’s An Ear in a Pond (1965) appended to a poem near the beginning of the book. ‘Seeing what it does’ is an apt way of engaging with a book which stages pond not just as a noun but as a verb, a doing word: a ‘ponding’, a cycle of risings and fallings, of ‘swellings & disappearances’, and of spreadings beyond margins into what Tim Ingold would call a ‘zone of entanglement’. Not just ‘a pond’ but ‘it ponds’ (p.57).

 

What this compelling and remarkable work does is to carry out its own imperatives, its directions to see what a pond does by a practice of daily engagement with it. ‘Go walk. Listen to the roaring of ponds’ (p.40). This mantra is repeated throughout the book and the poems accordingly form an extended sequence, structured around the poet’s discipline of walking each day to a tiny pond on London’s Blackheath. There are four sections roughly corresponding not just to the seasons but to their seasonality – each covers the move from one season to another: there is nothing fixed or compartmentalised in the dynamic world of this book – and a fifth part suggesting a cycle of movement. Even the title can be read as another exhortation: to mimic pond. This pond, itself able to mimic and mirror, becomes creative model, suggesting a ‘fitful’ poetics for a world of flux, saturation, and depletion.

 

As the pond cycles through its incarnations as waterbody, stone body, and vegetal, fruiting body, shifting its margins to tangle with its physical, social, and historical environments, we also have to shift our frame of reference: each poem unsettles our previous way of thinking about pond by presenting us with a new lens, a new modifier accompanying each title. We are invited to approach pond successively as ‘hollow’, as ‘still’, as ‘hole’ and so on, or even in terms of our own fleshbodies: as ‘ear’, ‘palm’, or ‘mouth’ etc.

 

That the world of this pond is permeable and processual, a network of relationships coming into being though time and space, is made clear by the introductory epigraphs; in particular, the quotation from Tim Ingold’s concept of the ‘open world’ which has ‘no insides or outsides, only comings and goings’. It seems that the pond occupies a glitchy fold in these comings and goings though spacetime, a place where past and present mesh and where the pond can hold ‘air, space, ground/in relation’ (p.42).  A liminal space, it opens to above and below, both ‘[a] hole to see the sky through’ and ‘[a] fantasy of depth, unplumbed’ (p.115, p103).  

 

It isn’t just the pond which glitches. The poems themselves flicker in and out of view as the reader is invited to move between the poetic text and its accompanying material. The collection includes rich visual material such as a page from the author’s notebook, a fragment of a map, and photographs of the pond taken by the author, images which present the pond in its many instantiations from stony to watery.  Of this visual material, the most striking is an additional image used on the cover, also by the author, which shows wiggly reflections of spiky reeds and grasses breaking the pond’s watery surface in reflected lamplight, and is highly suggestive of squiggly asemic marks or pen strokes. This is pond as a kind of writing, a teasing suggestion that pond and poetry are somehow entangled.

 

There are further entanglements in the book’s intertextual references to Thoreau, to Blake and other poets, its echoes of the place’s history of ‘rebellions, political speeches, assemblies and sermons’, and its concluding section of ‘Wild Notes,

 Marginalia, Related Reading’ (p.124). This is a gorgeous spreading of poetic margins from pond into astrophysics, meteorology, climate science, archaeology as well as the wider literary context. The poems themselves seem to expand their edges as they are recontextualised by these references, but they also wink out of sight as the reader turns the pages to move back and forth between text, image and notes (or is referred to links outside the book entirely). The poem ‘Glass’ suggests that the pond is like a book in its secrets and mysterious conjunctions, like ‘the gutter of a book/that keeps things hidden’, however Watts’ s book is also like the pond, sharing in its open environment (p.75). It too is either a ‘seam for disturbances’ or ‘a placing of convergence’ (pp.74-75). Both pond and book can be ‘[thought] of’ as ‘a field of forces’ (p56).

 

The book’s prefatory material, which seems to be a simple account of the fieldwork accompanying the writing of these poems, in fact complicates what the work is doing (and what role language has in that ‘doing’).  As well as informing us that ‘Mimic Pond came together through an almost daily walking practice’, Watts also tells us that writing became ‘a form of regular documenting’. She references the inspiration of Walking in Air, an interdisciplinary project led by Will Montgomery and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé, which proposes walking as a form of thinking. But if Mimic Pond is a kind of walking in writing, perhaps it is also proposing writing as a ‘thinking’: the kind of thinking which might be necessary to engage with the question posed by Watts in her previous collection, Kelptown (Shearsman, 2020) where she asks, how do we live in a living world of continuities and connections?  

 

And if a new kind of thinking is to take place in writing, what kind of language does it need? And that brings us back to the imperative: mimic pond. Interestingly, this is not quite the same kind of ‘daily’ writing that Watts describes as part of her fieldwork. We can see an example of this ‘writing as a form of regular documenting’ on the notebook page included in the appended materials. Whilst the poems are rooted in the observations of these ‘wild notes’, they themselves use a different kind of language. As the cover image suggests, they follow the imperative to ‘mimic pond’.

 

In the first section, which moves from January into a ‘dry spring’ (‘Diaphragm’), walking and thinking is in the footsteps of a ghostly wolf, the extinct shadow of the modern dog. And dogs themselves here slip between manifesting as actual dogs ‘policing’ the pond, and dog-become-language, also shifting from noun to verb, becoming another imperative, to dog. Thus, the title of the first poem ‘Dog Section’ is also a doing, a dogged walking to the pond where ‘arrival seems a daily occurrence’. Here language fluctuates in company with the pond which ripples and disappears into the reflection of ‘lifting, bathing crows’, or turns into reeds which ‘stand in for water’ or is left only as ‘cupped intention, small stones’ (p.12, p.16).  So too the language fluctuates through shifting levels of meaning and strange reversals, an active playful thinking about pond in writing. Dogs become a combined unit in language (‘dog section’ or ‘dog unit’) as they merge in the pond’s mirror:

 

                                            Sometimes the dog unit

combines, framing reflection in police downtime.

(p.13).

 

Or, they metamorphose through the pond’s mirror into the very thieving birds who taunt them, flickering in and out of reflected ‘fragments’ which are also the circling crows. This is a poetic language without fixed boundaries within which words shift, scatter, combine and change place as does the pond itself.

 

In the poem ‘Diaphragm’, the idea of breathing also deeply connects the pond, as ‘earth’s diaphragm’, with the poem in its expanding and contracting couplets which end-stop or over-run, as ‘breath discovers barricades’ and then expands over them. ‘This pond’ and the poem are both ‘a diaphragm/for reverberating margins’ (p.21). This poem is also the first of many poems in the book which occupy only the top half of the page. The text is accompanied by an open space, an inbreath of potential from which the words appear or into which they disappear. Like the pond, the writing is ‘readying for a return’ by an ‘upwelling’ which is dependent on its seasons of creative interrelationships (p.16).

 

This poem is also a stunning example of how Watts’s writing is an active thinking. The language here is full of extraordinary reversals and unexpected relationships challenging the reader to re-imagine and think differently. We are warned early in this poem that language may unmoor from its conventional usage in order to take on new work: ‘Nothing is held here, porous to/deeper saturations’ (p.17). This anticipates brilliant passages of vivid conceptualisation. In the shallows of this pond, skimming stones becomes a metaphysical activity:

 

To skim stones would be to send them

across space, twisting

 

a horizontal plumb line, pulled into radial

delinquencies.

(p.20).

 

Like the skimming, twisting stones which turn the heavy plumb of gravity into defiant spokes of playful motion, so thinking becomes a dynamic opening, a centrifugal explosion of mental energy which carries across spacetime. The flying stones of the present become the historical mortar fire for which the mound by the pond was famous:

 

Send them skimming, by this mount

for trying mortars.

 

History surfaces as ordnance, in

curious trajectories

(p.21).

 

The poetry carries the thought in lines that twist and skim across the pages. The reader’s imagination is stretched to reimagine spatiotemporal dimensions, bodies, and otherness. Throughout this section, and across the collection, we are asked to engage with strange, reversing directionality (‘As the day sieves, it rises’) and unsettling synaesthetic, sensory conflations:

 

This ear, open to myopic resurgences.

Hears the whole sky.

           (p.24).

 

This requires an active, thoughtful engagement with our own senses and preconceptions, necessary because, as this pond demonstrates, we inhabit and co-construct a reality which cannot be understood in straightforward ways. Thus, these poems require us to imagine in new ways: the pond becomes ‘a fleshy palm’ or a ‘plague apple’ (p.31, p.70).

 

One of the reasons why we need to think differently is because this is a reality which includes what is no longer there. ‘Palm’ challenges us to think about ‘How we inhabit extraction’ and the ‘long/unacknowledged history’ of mining and quarrying (p.33). In ‘Repair’, a poem towards the end of the collection, the sudden vanishings and re-emergences of the pond (‘The other day there was nothing here at all’) become a manifestation of all the weighty absences we inhabit:

 

Ah, that nothing. How we are bound to it,

the way it moves & creeps, heavy

with cargoes.

(p.107).

 

And this poem is explicit about how this requires of us a different kind of thinking, a reparative, conscious paying of attention, here like that of ‘a seamstress who understood/living repair’ (p.106).

 

In the third section (which moves from Autumn to Winter), ‘Glass’ poignantly revisits the question of what kind of language is needed to think differently. Conventional language which predicates the world into subjects and objects is no use here, its hierarchies responsible for ‘the damage of realising/existences’ and so this pond-as-verb, as ponding, is ‘irreducible to/words’. But a kind of language comes anyway: ‘Yet words arrive, the drive to/predication annulled’ (pp.76-77). These are fitful, Puckish words, the poet’s dream of a language which ‘ponds’ as it mutates, evades, and keeps its secrets, akin to the organic, asemic marks of the book’s cover:

 

Plants reserve their marks

at the surface, brittle, bending,

(p.79).

 

These are marks which reserve their meanings as they ‘yield to drowned articulation’ or may by chance be stumbled upon in their ‘mudlark/affordances’ (p.79). And, as the poem concludes, it is perhaps through absence made graphically visible, that the earth might speak. Watts summons here the gaps and fragments of Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho (If Not, Winter) as the epitome of a poetic language with the fragility, subtlety, and yet elasticity to rise, fall, and transform with the world:

 

                  an arc of struggle

 

swells to meet the air

which is water & light in depletion,

 

if not winter, returning a visible earth,

this hour, to its own

 

sentences.

(p.80).

 

Given the sometimes elusive, often volatile, and always enmeshed nature of the pond, it might seem surprising that Harriet Tarlo describes Mimic Pond (back cover) as a ‘quiet’ as well as ‘beautiful work’ and that Watts herself talks about its ‘quiet attention’  and yet this rings true. The attentiveness is easily apparent in the active ‘thinking’ of the poetry, but the work’s ‘quietness’ lies more in its tones and rhythms. The tone has a measured spaciousness, a wondering, self-aware alertness that pays meticulous heed to the potential dangers of its own presence (‘Everywhere I step I make cracks!’) but without losing its restraint, returning us repeatedly to its disciplined imperatives: ‘Walk’ and ‘Listen for the roar’ (p.102, p.115).

 

This steadiness only occasionally gives way to more elevated or despairing tones. The crows, for all their cocky, garrulous clamour, provide some of the collection’s most buoyant moments: as they hang in the air, ‘principles of flight buoy momentary/uplift taffetas’ (p. 28). In the latter parts of the collection, there is perhaps an intensifying awareness of the serious harm resulting from human actions, nevertheless the tone generally keeps to its main purpose: a ‘daily presenting’ (p.106). There are moments where this restraint seems to be about to give way. ‘Glitch’ in the fourth section engages most directly with the destructiveness of human behaviour as it evokes the terrible damage done by nuclear explosions and connects John Evelyn’s memoir of seventeenth century mortar trials with the contemporary war in Ukraine. A condemnatory anger is almost heard in the bitten back satire of ‘our father/of the H-bomb, which art. Etc.’ but the poem pulls back from this, and from Evelyn’s horrified description of ‘murdering, mischief-doing engines/called bombs’ (pp.110-11). Instead, personal anger expands into something more-than-human: a wordless, tragic roar. Yet the poet’s words still come. In the quiet of the pond’s listening to itself beneath a shadeless, white sky, a winter snowfall is terrible elegy for, and prophecy of, nuclear winter and deadly warfare:

 

Slow hum standing in for silence. Arctic reach

in the wind, changes state,

 

skinlessly, while they fall.

(p.112).

 

The quiet attentiveness of the tone, its discipline and focus, allows us to listen to the pond, to attend to ‘how it roars’.

 

Similarly, the rhythms of the poetry communicate a quiet spaciousness. Not the restless, trickster shiftings of the pond itself but more like the wheeling, diurnal rhythms of earth and sky, suggesting perhaps that the restless energies of the pond are held within the bigger rhythms of the universe. We feel in them the earth’s curves and parabolas, a recurring motif throughout the collection. Read aloud, these rhythms create a sense of how the great rise and fall of the universe is mirrored in the restless turbulence of the pond:

 

In January, the water reflects my movement

as we wheel

(p.12).

 

Of Watts’s earlier book ‘When Blue Light Falls’, Isobel Armstrong said, ‘[t]his is a major philosophical poem of our generation’.  Whilst this might also be said of Watts’s latest collection, Mimic Pond ultimately resists abstraction, grounding its thinking in the discipline of its daily engagement with the material world: a world endlessly present yet elusive; unpredictable yet entangled. As the poems reach their heights of philosophical thought – themselves becoming ‘uplift taffetas’ – they also draw us back to the materiality and temporal structures of Watts’s handwritten ‘wild notes’ and to the fragile insistence of this living world.

 

 

References

 

Tim Ingold talks about ‘zones of entanglement’ in ‘Bindings against boundaries: entanglements of life in an open world’, Environment and Planning 40 (2008). Isobel Armstrong is quoted from the back cover of Carol Watts’s When Blue Light Falls (Shearsman, 2018). For ease of reference, the titles of Watts’s poems are quoted from her Contents Page rather than the parenthetical form used within the volume itself.