Polyp

vagabond Press (2024)

Polyp, named after the coral’s tentacular polyp, is Ashley Haywood's highly anticipated debut collection of poetry. Drawing upon palaeologist 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

An imaginative work of great integrity, rich with sensuous detail, Polyp examines the human, the mythological and the corporeal in the context of the anthropocene. With their formal adventurousness and imaginative richness, they collect to consider the poetic and the animal, the linguistic and the ineffable. – Thomas Shapcott Award Judges

Polyp is available for pre-order/purchase through Vagabond Press now – thank you!

Cover image: Margaret Watts-Hughes, 'Untitled Voice Figure', pigment on glass, date unknown (late-1800s). Image courtesy of Cyfarthfa Castle Museum & Art Gallery.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.