As the global ecological crises deepens, fire and water, elements that bring warmth, life, become increasingly threatening as we hold our breath, the earth burning and drowning. In Becoming Wetland Yvonne Baker dives into the existential menace of a world whose waters have lost rhythm and balance. But we are never in the realm of the didactic. This watery world is one of sorrow and questions, of images so precise and clear we feel them as our own. With her gift for making connections, between heart and world, between events and objects that could go unnoticed and the ripples of their impact, Yvonne Baker skilfully takes us ‘into the waters / of the reedbed as it sinks into darkness’ where we find the lost objects of ordinary, inundated lives. And in a central sequence we move forward through time, looking back on ourselves through the eyes of those still to be born to find, ‘a reminder of the years when we still had hope.’ But back in the present, that hope has not failed, if only we will listen and accept the blessing on those of us, all of us, ‘caught / between the ochre heat, the black rain.’ Timely, poignant and beautiful, from a poet whose writing warns, comforts and invites us to feel deeply.
