Iain Bamforth

We have to highlight Scottish poet Iain Bamforth's work, he's incredible and unique--especially for people who love nature, the earth, the sciences and zoology/biology. His piece "Metazoa" in ThreePennyReview is a great example of this. It's quite like the famous Argentinian short story writer Jorge Luis Borges [1899-1986] and even a bit like famous Italian novel writer and semiotician Umberto Eco. It's both lovely, interesting and strange.

Also read his "Flying Garuda over Java", a great poem, here's a tiny excerpt:

[...] These are the twenty cones of Java.
They could be those of Io,
mooning around Jupiter –

and a little farther away
Bromo and Semeru
swimming in their violet haze.[...]

Here's an excerpt of "Metazoa":

[...]

8

In his poem “Amenaza” (Threat), the Mexican poet Gerardo Deniz modifies the English verb “jeopardize” in order to create a terrifying new feline creature, the jeopard.



9

Our unexceptionally torpid meeting at the Ministry of Health on the Castries waterfront was enlivened by one of the beautiful local crested hummingbirds hovering in a flash of madder and indigofera for a few moments outside the plate glass. It made me think of the fabulous plate in Ernst Haeckel’s nineteenth-century bestseller Kunstformen der Natur, which shows about a dozen of these gorgeous creatures in the same poster-space; and then I recalled reading that hummingbirds are only ever hours away from starving to death, such are the metabolic demands placed upon them by the very rapid beating of their wings. At night they reduce their basic metabolic activities to a minimum in order to conserve energy. I left the meeting with inconsequential bits of conversation in my mind, much as in Paul Muldoon’s poem “Humming-bird,” an ornithon of gossipy phrases seemingly snatched on the wing. That was my St. Lucia epiphany.
[...]