Ashley Haywood, Polyp
HIGHLY COMMENDED in THE 2024 FIVE ISLANDS PRIZE FOR A FIRST BOOK OF POETRY
'There is a profound integrity to the ecological voice evident in Polyp. Meticulously researched, these compressed yet expansive poems respond to the archives of paleologist and geologist Dorothy Hill with an intuitive, radical approach to language that allows the non-human world to speak, to resonate within the reader in profound ways. Polyp is science-based poetry that resonates with feeling and does so the more it is re-read.
Haywood breaks the poetic line mid-word, turns phrases into sculptures or rock formations, makes the white space of the page stutter and breathe. The poetry enters vivid and thrilling conversation with other art forms. It is filled with questions, exclamations, dashes, ellipses and flashes of aphoristic insight and humour, and yet achieves a collection of coherence.
The poems are finely crafted and as sparse as a coral reef or the remains of a forest. Haywood takes us out of our human ego into the vastness and connectedness of the natural world in the anthropocene. The poems reach for survival and call through time, imploring Where do I go? Who do I tell? Can you hear me? This collection is a new kind of ecopoetry and a testament to the power of very few words to express an immense amount.
Polyp provides a fresh reading experience and proposes a new ecology of how language works. The collection is playful in form and deeply serious in how it offers us pause to feel and see the world anew. Though minimal in length, this collection swells with deep echoes of resonance. The reading experience is akin to wandering through an art exhibition or immersion in music. It acts as an artful field guide as to how we might attend differently to the relationship between the human and more than human world.' 2024 FIVE ISLANDS PRIZE JUDGES' REPORT
Polyp, named after the coral’s tentacular polyp, is Ashley Haywood's highly anticipated debut collection of poetry. Drawing upon paleologist and geologist Dorothy Hill’s collected papers for inspiration, Polyp explores corals, fossils, seeds; tracing out the I of the poems through strata, deep-time, and the Anthropocene with urgency, compassion and the kind of anxiety that spurs action. This remarkable livre compose seeks the ineffable in the loops and flows of ecological and geological systems, as well as through its own linguistic formalities and experimentations. Polyp grows from itself like fractal shoots, then snips its feet to create new forms. A wild I slips between layers on the page, desirous of multiplicities, time-fullness and connection, looking back to ask, Who’s there? What poem are you? Exquistely rendered through fragmentation and recombination, Haywood's debut collection offers a vital and nuanced reinvigoration of ecopoetics, raising the questions for each of us, 'What have I done, what haven't I done?'
Diffracting ecology through body, burial through being, speech through matter, Haywood's map-making renders language molecular. Polyp charts cartographies of deep time, deep memory, distant horizons, where strangeness steeps into self, where the many-speaking mouths of lands-to-come wait to wake us. Shastra Deo
... a quiet voice that draws us to consider the brevity of human consciousness against the enormous span of geological time … Thought-provoking, playful, poised. Thomas Shapcott Award Judges
Ashley Haywood is writer, artist and poet whose work often dwells in the art-science nexus. She is the inaugural UQ Fryer Library Creative Writing Fellow (2017-2018), thrice shortlisted for the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize (2020 Runner-up, 2021, 2022), and winner of the QRAA Ekphrasis Challenge (2020) in her category. Ashley’s poetry has appeared in Australian Poetry Anthology, Cordite, Australian Poetry Journal, Meanjin, Southerly, Rabbit, AXON and TEXT, among other places. She holds a PhD on signs, minds and creativity, or how to write like painting, and has a background in biological science. She currently lives on Kau-in Kau-in of the Ningy Ningy and Gubbi Gubbi Peoples just north of Meanjin with her partner and their four-year-old son.
Ashley Haywood, Polyp
2024. 148mm x 210mm. 64pp.
ISBN 978-1-925735-66-6
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.
