A Cranic of Ordinaries

This cranic, or skull, of ordinaries is a landscape well-known to poet Eliza O'Toole who has long tramped the Stour Valley on the Suffolk-Essex border with her dog Fin, nose-down tail-up, urging her on. In the muddy paint-water of John Constable and the rambling madness of John Clare, O'Toole takes her own step lightly into a calendar year of a landscape displaced. Chronicling the cycle of seasons, book-ended by (poisonous) aconites, these poems are decisive moments in time that mark life-death-decay, as a series of alternative, textual landscape paintings. At times raw, O'Toole points toward the corrosion of landscape rendered in words or oils by a masculine eye and the ironic subsequent degradation of this pastoral idyll by ongoing very real eco-losses and agri-changes. Yet, in elevating the landscape unto itself, a complex undergrowth of magnetic field work emerges and from that, the lithe 'isness' of place which never fully subscribes to human cartographics and which, in its fundament, will long outlast us.


'This collection of poetry is earthed with the most intricately fused and intelligent forms of the Lyric I have ever read. Each line and phrase so unpredictably, yet naturally, cultivates its context, making new orders of linguistic substance, and in this way is truly Nature poetry, with interacting points-of-view between weed, word, weather, dog; we move and make our way through each poem as a witness that is part of the chorus and part of the scene.' -Holly Pester


'A gloriously visceral work of soil and scent, of earthen truths and raking sunlight.' -James Canton


'There is a vivacity in this studious pastoral whose verdant language rearranges sensory thought, just as the nuances of hedgerow, clipped, deadened or growing, are constantly in flux. O'Toole excavates a beloved landscape with her attendant animal, a traditional landscape cultured in paint, set loose in the updug considerations of thought-walking. With a grave-digger's syntax and painter's rag, the poet rubs and rings this place into stark life. As an antidote to the incestuous relationship of nature writer to landscape, A Cranic of Ordinaries, enables the poet to encounter the fields and furrows as set loose, displaced from the formality of depiction. With an urn in one hand and a hound in the other, O'Toole creates a courage of space in which latent disciplines turn, rot and resurface in a revised field of altercation. This is a necessarily difficult, necessarily sparse collection: a year molten, blown, cooled and hardened as a field-glass lens of experience. Extraordinary.' -MacGillivray


'In Eliza O'Toole's A Cranic of Ordinaries natural environs close to the poet's home are traversed in one calendar year, but this is no romanticised offering of seasons. We learn This land is time and in time this land will bury us, yet before this happens, O'Toole captures the very moment, the exact point where the land she encounters alongside her beloved dog Fin, is 'shivering', 'percussive', 'brackish', 'friable'. Never have I been so utterly immersed in a place. We are taken to an old river with an old name but given an entirely new, distinct, and captivating language'. -Rebecca Goss See more