The chance to go shagging down the woods — Steve Ely's WIP Incendium Amoris

What's the new book about?

The themes are quite diverse— love, sex, England and the English, the English language, the attempt to salvage meaning and value from tradition, religion and history, the need to restore and preserve nature, wildlife and  landscape, anti-Semitism, social-justice and social-banditry, violence, yeoman-anarchism and so on — but are unified by the life, writings and landscape of Rolle. Rolle anchors the poems, they’re not about him per se — although some of them are. As a whole, the piece embodies a kind of transcendental parochialism (in Kavanagh’s usage), the assertion of which might be the over-riding ethos of the book, or certainly its underlying raison d'être. What’s it about? Fire in the belly.  Robertus Swynherd against the French King. Heat, sweetness, song.  

How is it different from your previous work?

I’m drawn to certain themes (see above) that arise out my vision and critique of England and my related critique of the scorched-earth devastations of (post)modern (late)capitalist consumer-narcissism. I write about the same things again and again. My Werewolf poems (some of which have recently published in The Poetry Review and the London Review of Books, for example) are overtly about the potential for extremes of violence in humanity but they’re really about the dehumanisation, alienation and anomie that follows from reducing humans to political and civic powerlessness, stripping them of identity and reducing them to market cyphers in our devil-take-the hindmost society. Oswald’s Book of Hours was an exploration of English identity, but inchoately posited an alternative to the world Werewolf addressed, in much the same way as Englaland, my next book of poems (Smokestack, 2014), will. Incendium Amoris is more personal, quieter. All it wants is: the reflooding of the fens, the reversal of the reformation, the reintroduction of the wolf, ten acres and a cow and the chance to go shagging down the woods.

Photo credit: Steve Ely, early mock-up

Could you talk us through what stage the manuscript is at now and what further work you'll be doing?

Every one of the forty-eight poems of Incendium Amoris has already been through a very thorough drafting process — typically between fifteen and thirty drafts — so they’re reasonably polished. I’ve already clipped out poems I didn’t think were good enough to get in, so my expectation is that these forty-eight will survive, even the two or three that are still problematic — I’m confident I’ll sort them. By arranging them into the shape of a provisional ‘collection’ they’re now like a half erected tent. You can see the shape and most of the pegs and one or two of the guy ropes are in, but it looks a bit floppy. Over the next several weeks I’ll repeatedly re-read the typescript in dozens of short, often almost incidental bursts of between ten minutes and an hour; often several per day, making annotations, striking out articles, adding, deleting, nibbling and tweaking.  Every couple of weeks I’ll make the changes and print a new version.  The tent is now looking more solid and taut; a few more guy-ropes are in, the pegs have been stretched, etc. I repeat this process a couple of times until I’m ready to camp out in it. It usually takes two or three months.