Some therapists ask their clients, “What colour do you associate with that thought?” It is a popular approach for visualising and tackling problems. Flynn innovatively explores this technique with regard to ecology. What image of the future can humans conjure and hold? Are we hurtling towards darkness or instead into the light?
The collection’s initial pessimism is difficult to swallow – the future is a “black cup of loneliness”, half empty, not half full. Ice caps bleed out, stranding penguins on glacial shards. Bees disappear. The apocalypse arrives. This vision fades to grey as plumes of pollution rise, before then blazing red with record temperatures and clouds of blood. The future is a charred kaleidoscope of chaos, recalling the bushfires in the poet’s Australian home town.
In The Oxygen Makers we meet stromatolites, the oldest fossils on Earth. Their ancient wisdom insists that “all we need is time” – time to develop sustainable technology and more respectful ways of living. Time to gift our descendants something more useful than a sepia postcard of despair, “a world bleached of meaning”. Yet these poems also dare us to challenge this excuse. Perhaps we don’t have time. Maybe what counts is cultivating a more colourful imagination.
Flynn’s poetry is a perfect example – painfully visceral, it plays feverishly on the bodily senses until we sit up and listen. One poem hoists us 15,000 metres above time, while another mourns trees that are memorably “boiling with birds”. His imagery catches the imagination off-guard, injecting life into defeatist perceptions of dismal and dying worlds. The future might be fragile, but nothing is black and white. Statistics, stakes and outlooks are constantly shifting, like birds in flight, as in the breathless poem Salt Lake:
Sometimes the future’s flight is straight and smooth
like shining summer runways,
but then it brings you way out here
where the ground is endless crust
that snaps underneath your feet
to free the thick black sludge that lurks below
and where the trees are pale dry prisoners
thrust deep in permanent winter,
their bony arms stretched wide in pleading
to whoever might have put them here.
There is a tidal energy to Flynn’s language, a pulse to each poem that pushes punctuation to its limits. I am haunted by the image of trees as prisoners – locked into a polluted and plundered soil, cries falling on deaf ears. Tragically, trees are not the lifeform to have “waved sign language,/ warnings forever ignored”. In Hope, endangered whales slap their fins on the waves like morse code – a symphony of wet pleas swept out to sea. Even a seabird drops clues from it claws; an ecological “ambassador” that asks, when will we learn?
Although these poems are prophetic, they avoid self-righteous preaching, acknowledging that the psychological barriers to engaging with ecological issues are manifold. They sympathise with the difficulty of acting today when tomorrow looms so large. Occasionally, they flirt dangerously close to an overly romanticised tone – is the grinding of ice really the sound of a continent making love? Still, this book is a heartfelt and harrowing wake-up call. If the climate crisis involves a crisis of emotion, then colour therapy is a helpful start – Flynn’s pen strikes the page like flint, stoking the fire of hope within.
• The Colour of Extinction by SC Flynn is published by Renard Press (£10). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
After the Bushfire by SC Flynn
The smouldering night has exhausted itself
and sunrise bleeds away the bruises,
slipping a red-gold mask over the landscape,
eyes half shut against the drifting ash.
Burnt trees stand in piles of cinders
that will soon be cold and dense as omens;
syllables of a scattered alphabet
asking questions of their ragged shadows.
Underneath the forest’s puzzled face
and the ground’s grey bankruptcy lie seeds
that have waited years for this, as if to say,
Let me breathe again, give me back the sky.
