ON THE SOHO LEOPARD

Published in Poetry Book Society Bulletin Summer 2004
" Nature never did betray the heart that loved her", was one of Darwin's favourite lines from his favourite poet. He took Wordsworth with him for his five years on the Beagle, and his land expeditions off into the Cordilleras. But what about us betraying nature?

We always have. The Epic of Gilgamesh is the first account of large-scale deforestation. In Mesopotamia, Gilgamesh fights the guardian demi-god of the cedar forest, an "abode of gods": then fells the trees with adzes and axes. Civilizations like Ur, Knossos and Rome rose while the forests they were built of, and the animals within them, vanished. Mesopotamia, that then was dense forest, is barren desert now.

How history happened.

But in our day it's happening faster than ever before, too fast for nature to restore and regenerate.

I've been travelling in Asia these last two years to write a book about wild tigers and where they live. Tigers only live in forests, which is why forests have become my image of what gets lost. Most of these poems took shape while I was realizing I had to write that book. With other books, non-fiction I've written has got into poems in odd oblique ways. This subject, once I started reading about it, took over completely.

Another thing that walked into them was Charles Darwin. My grandmother, whom I usd to love staying with, whose garden and the wilderness outside became my first image of exploring woodland alone, was his grand-daughter.
That happenstance used to seem just a sliver of family background, something to do with my granny; nothing to do with work. But once tigers were on my mind I started reading him properly; because I needed him.

I also started reading zoological books, on the morphology of the alligator, for instance, or the vibrissae in a fox's nose. I have files in my laptop like "canid biology", "equine genetics", "hunting with cheetahs". This book contains the only poem I know on the mating technique of alligators.

Behind all this lies the need for art to make sense of things. One poem about Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots shows both cousins united in turning to art in lonely moments; though one had a whole lot more of those than the other.

If I were a critic of this book, I might tackle its overtly human subjects by opposing two figures. There is a Siberian woman disinterred in the Altai Mountains: she may, archaeologists think, have been a story-teller because of her head-dress. Or because she was buried alone, with horses and gold. You could (I might argue) take her as the solitary artist, who stands for courage, exploration, the red horizon; for the worth of what you honestly try to make. Like the Chinese artist in the final sequence, searching for the tiger; hoping to glimpse, and try to paint, the beauty and mystery and wildness which "tiger" has always embodied: this deep dangerous glow in Asian forests whose lord and meaning the tiger has always been. Until now.

Against her, and against the tiger, is the enemy of art and nature who appears intermittently as the Corrupt Official, the Minister with a Brief for Charming Explanation. He sells the ancient forest, betrays and beheads his own lover. He is the Beast who fails Beauty; the Man who steals from Jaguar the fire and the weapons which Jaguar taught him. An Orpheus whose imagination impoverishes Eurydice. Alcibiades who tried to seduce Socrates and ended by betraying his city to the enemy. Judas, for whom the twelfth candle at the wake was always kept unlit.

But I'm not a critic. Not of this book. In the end the words and their relations with each other are the important thing.

I'll leave it there.