goodlands: sonnets on land

Author: Fred Spoliar

Publisher: Veer Books (2022)

"Urgently unproductive, goodlands will and won’t dig into the rubbled grounds of capitalocene pastoral, where the accumulations of enclosure and empire and the accretions of tenancy are the conditions for sonneteering and the lyric subject’s ‘slot for frack sachet i.’ This poetry refuses to (be) work, ‘to hitch art to the ethical plough,’ to improve; rather, it inhabits the detritus of proximity, an ‘aesthetics of crushed’ where residual exhaustions meet blackberry-juice erotics, contradictory flower boxes, and comrade owls. If HM Land Registry structures the couplet, where are the (already-and-not-yet-sprung) poetics of land defence? goodlands is nettle-sharp and wanting, haunting ‘this park I have to unlearn loving / but also can’t leave.’"

—Katy Lewis Hood