Jane Robinson is an Irish poet and biologist. She was educated at Trinity College Dublin and the California Institute of Technology and worked as a scientist in Ireland, India, and the US for ten years before turning to writing, particularly poetry, to express and explore the urgent issue of environmental change. Her poems have been recognized by awards including the Strokestown International Poetry Prize and the Shine Strong Award for her debut collection, Journey to the Sleeping Whale. Her second poetry collection, Island and Atoll, forthcoming from Salmon, was launched in March 2023.

Work towards Island and Atoll began in 2018, as soon as my first book was accepted for publication by Jessie Lendennie, visionary founder and editor of Salmon Poetry Press. I hoped my second book would have a shorter gestation period, and would not be as difficult to write as second volumes are reputed to be.

But my impulse to explore troubling spaces and to learn from people with experience of conflict made the process more demanding. I am concerned that what humans are doing to the natural world is equivalent to a war against nature. The actions of commerce, and of many governments, continue to cause grave damage. The coldness of the screen, combined with paralysing eco-anxiety, has ruined our mental wellbeing. The violence of the combustion engine is melting the ice caps and changing the chemistry of the oceans. And yet we continue with business-as-usual?

Determined to learn from poets who had experienced conflict, I hurried to Cork Poetry Festival to read at the Introductions session and meet American soldier-poet Brian Turner. I was terrified. I was also late as usual and trying to make up time while I drove through a deluge in my little old car. I would usually not overtake an articulated lorry at 120km per hour, and certainly not in the pouring rain, but I took the risk that morning; all the while keeping in mind the story of a fairy-thorn thicket cleared to make way for the road, and the subsequent unexplained accidents on this stretch of the M8. I muttered apologies to the beings of the hawthorn grove and pressed the accelerator pedal all the way to the worn floor-carpet. The car shuddered and it seemed as though I drove underwater, then burst back to the surface when we finally passed the lorry and coasted into sunshine as the road lay clear ahead. 

Brian turned out to be the gentlest of men and treated me and my work with hand-held-to-heart respect. That respect was helpful as I have been writing in earnest for a long time and had become quite discouraged by the time a publisher picked up my first collection. At Cork in early 2018, I was still re-ordering the poems in that collection, ‘Journey to the Sleeping Whale’, and Brian gave some general suggestions, such as: stick all the sheets on a big wall and look at them. I didn’t have a big, empty wall but the advice seemed helpful anyway, I’m a sucker for advice. Actually, if anyone bothered to ask me, I would, at this stage, have all kinds of suggestions for ordering a poetry collection. The main one being to leave as much space and light and sea-room as possible, especially if the subject matter is dense or worrying.

In my efforts to write outside my comfort zone I also participated in the ‘XBorders: Accord’ programme offered by the Irish Writers Centre, and run by Maria McManus, Patsy Horton and Valerie Bistany, where we heard about conflict resolution from various experts. Paradoxically, perhaps, I wrote a series of nine elegies for the great auk, an iconic North Atlantic bird driven extinct by human hunters a century ago; ‘Night’ is included in this volume. The great auk’s closest living relative, the Atlantic puffin, is now endangered by our actions, including overfishing, hunting, and climate change.

In that same productive period I wrote The Body as a Peaceful Island and Satellite Footage.

But to fully describe the writing of ‘Island and Atoll’ would be to tell you my full and complex autobiography, something I certainly don’t intend to do. About a decade ago, when I had almost given up hope of ever having a collection published, I would comfort myself with the thought that each piece I completed was like making a miniature book. Take, for example, ‘Power’ (Island and Atoll, 2023 p 24, first published in The North, 2021) which touches on many lived experiences, including childhood walks with my mother to pick primroses from the shady sides of hedges near where she grew up in county Cork; being taken on a boat by my father to participate in the successful Carnsore Point protest carrying childish posters made with my sisters; learning to drive in California, when I ran out of fuel on the 101 (having spent my last few dollars on an art book at the Norton Simon Museum) twenty miles short of Pasadena where I was then working on a PhD in science; a journey across the border to Mexico to help my friend (unsuccessfully) attempt to renew his visa; and a more recent swim in San Diego with our small daughters.

And when I unfurl and expand it like this, I wish I had written all those books so I quickly tuck the sparse words back onto their page. I say: here you go, make of it what you will, and this is your one explanatory footnote: ‘Carnsore Point in Wexford was the site of a protest festival that led the Irish government to drop their plans for building a nuclear power plant.’ I might also have explained that as well as being shorthand for the extraction and generation of power, the poem’s title reflects on the power of protest movements. Which brings me to the thought that a decade earlier, while my father was studying for a professional degree in London, my young parents probably took me along as an infant to protests organized by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. They had an old blue camper van we called ‘the blue car’ but that is another story.

On one of these expeditions we might have encountered the Irish actress and poet Madge Herron, then living in London, who features as a character in ‘The Babies’ and in ‘Dogs and the Baby Teeth’. Other Irish poets appear in these pages as well, such as in an encounter between Matthew Sweeney and a sea cow, ‘The Play’; thoughts of W. B. Yeats in a supermarket carpark, ‘For the Birds’; and in ‘On Seeing her X-Ray I Wrote a Letter to Patrick Kavanagh’ (begun 2011, edited over the next decade and first published in The Stony Thursday Book, 2023).

In this manner, I pieced together ‘Island and Atoll’ from a lifetime of diverse experiences, readings and encounters (real and imagined); in poems written over more than a decade, though most are fairly recent. The third section ‘Atoll’ is a cycle that engages with the terrible legacy of arms testing, and has a particular focus on the displacement and damage of the people and other beings who once inhabited Bikini Atoll. The displaced Marshall Islanders still cannot return to their home, but the reef begins to gather itself back together and the coconut crabs are thriving. My engagement with this subject began when I was studying at Caltech, not very far from JPL and Los Alamos, and saw the well-known gelatine silver print of men reclining in deck chairs to view an atomic test. It puzzled me then that all these intelligent and seemingly-good people, including scientists and engineers, would work so hard to violate the earth. It still does.

Some earlier poems in Journey to the Sleeping Whale (Salmon, 2018), e.g. ‘And This Madness’, ‘Single-handed’ and ‘Running Repairs’, could be considered as seeds for the current collection’s Atoll section. These seeds might never have developed had I not sought a professional development grant from the Dún Laoghaire Arts Office to collaborate with musician-composer Malachy Robinson on writing a cycle of poems, music and song. Steps towards a music drama to reflect on the fury unleashed at Bikini Atoll and elsewhere, and to imagine a more harmonious future. Malachy and I are first cousins and we jumped right in with plenty of trust, experimenting on different ways to integrate words and music. He works fast and decisively and so I had to pick up my pace which was both stressful and exhilarating.

Because of the distressing subject matter I kept writing and unwriting, guessing and second-guessing. Should I write a cycle of twenty three poems, each with the name of a test shot? No. Then might I somehow undo the damage by writing the names backwards “Ojavan, Inuz”? No, even this approach could disrespect the living members of those North American First Nations who, I was certain, had not given permission for their names to be used as codes by the US army; just as the Shoshone people did not give permission for their territories to be used as a mainland test site [Ian Zabarte, Las Vegas Review Journal, 2020: https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/nevada-views-nuclear-tests-and-the-shoshone-people-2063105/ ].

In the end, I arrived at the self-given brief to somehow integrate each of the code names into the text of ‘Island and Atoll’ at least once, even if it had to be hidden in an acrostic. And when I failed, was it on purpose? Perhaps because I work with words the ‘test shot’ code names bothered me greatly. I obsessed. I wrote twenty three mushroom clouds and then unwrote them, cut them apart with scissors and rearranged the words; shredded my attempts and fed them to the compost heap, the worms, the beneficial microorganisms. I wept and tried again.

Even when we were about to go to print, the handling of these materials and the revisiting of such extreme damage still bothered me. I added: ‘may these words cause no harm to any living being’, grateful for the kind patience of Salmon’s book designer Siobhán Hudson Jeanotte.  The translation into Irish used as an epigraph here was made by Bríd Lefévére Laoide who I met when we were both science students in Trinity College Dublin. She observed that to include such a disclaimer implied I thought my words could indeed cause damage. I might have discarded the work at that stage, or left it lying around somewhere to undergo progressive deterioration, but I had a publication date and a tour with professional musicians to honour.

So, with hesitation, I offer you this book ‘Island and Atoll’ (Salmon, 2023) complete with its human flaws and typos, comforted by the parable of handmade Persian rugs intentionally including errors in deference to Allah, who alone is allowed perfection.  Weavers successful in making a flawless rug, colour at least one flower petal oddly, so as not to offend their Gods. The Navajo rug weavers have a related belief which involves adding an asymmetrical line of colour or ‘Spirit Path’ leading from the pattern to the edge of the rug. This interruption of a perfect pattern prevents the maker’s spirit from being trapped inside her weaving.

For my next collection, I resolve to be so poised that the introduction of a deliberate error or spirit path is required. And, yes, Bríd and I did discuss her use of the phrase ‘an saothar seo’ (work of art/ work of the devil) and its relationship to the more modest ‘these words’. She also quoted John1.1 to me: ‘In the beginning was the word and the word was with God’. Not at all my territory, but thinking back and back through time it almost seems that things began to go wrong on earth when we humans invented words and outgrew our natural place. All our current mayhem and hubris stem from our use of words.

Meanwhile, back in 2020, Malachy was waiting for my words and ready to compose the next piece of music with a characteristic combination of genius and cheerful efficiency. Seen alongside my shredded inarticulacies, corrections and circumambulations, his process seems clean and direct as an arrow; what was it Herrigel wrote about the art of archery? While I learned a lot from our collaboration, I also grew to trust my own more scattered and reflective process, though it often seems inefficient and slow: a gathering of pieces, a carving and slotting together. And there is joy in my process, particularly when coincidence, or is it flow, takes over and everything fits seamlessly into place. We were both pleased with a sequence of haiku-like reflections ‘Verdant Codenames’ where Malachy used a recording of my voice as a starting point for his composition.

Having poured so much attention into a cycle of words and songs about far away events in faraway places – and may these events recede into history and never recur – I made efforts to anchor my book closer to home in the opening section, with a selection of work celebrating places and people on this island: Sandycove shoreline, a market garden on Glenamuck Road, St. Michael’s in Dún Laoghaire, the limestone bedrock of Cavan and Inishmore, the Zoology museum in Trinity College Dublin, Two Rock Mountain, Dublin Bay shoreline and so forth.

There is a shorter middle section ‘Ocean’ not mentioned in the book’s title (derived from the names of the first and last sections) where we set to sea in a home-made coracle; we encounter Norwegian whales and island cows; and meet the last great auk seen in Waterford, the names of the people who tried to rescue her. The all-important oceans did not want to be contained in this portion of the book, so sea water spills and brims into the intertidal zone of the opening page, soothes the recovering coral reef of the last, and flows around and between Ireland in the North Atlantic, and the coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean on many pages.

The selection of poems to include in ‘Island and Atoll’ involved a combination of practicality (those already published in journals), necessity (those essential for the collection), and happenstance. Or, as I said in a recent job interview in response to a question on how I organise myself: ‘I proceed by a combination of chance and determination’ – this may have lost me the job, but it seems as good a way as any to describe the making of a poetry collection. 

You can purchase Island and Atoll here: >https://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=584&a=328