Description

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022. Third Prize winner of the Laurel Prize 2022.

What is still wild in us – and is it recoverable? The poems in Wilder, Jemma Borg’s second collection, are acts of excavation into the deeper and more elusive aspects of our mental and physical lives. Whether revisiting Dante’s forest of the suicides, experiencing the saturation of new motherhood or engaging in a boundary-dissolving encounter with a psychedelic cactus, these meticulous and sensuous poems demonstrate a restless intelligence, seeking out what we are losing and inviting us to ‘break ourselves each against the beauty of the other’. They call on us to remember ourselves as the animals we are, in connection with the complex web of life in what Mary Midgley called an ‘extended sympathy’, and to consider wildness as a process of becoming, reforming and growth. We do not live in a time when we can afford denial. Instead, by being willing to enter despair, might we find what Gary Snyder described as ‘the real world to which we belong’ and recover the means to save what we are destroying?

Publisher Review

'A book about seeing through the dark, Jemma Borg's Wilder enacts a subtle illumination between the crepuscular and haptic and the dazzling and epigrammatic. Light is life itself, photosynthesising, meteorological, caught in poems similarly, beguilingly, changeable, imbued with a timeless and deep ecological knowing, the fruitful surrender of the human heart.' Linda France 'The versatility of this work bears witness to a very unusual combination of linguistic confidence and restless intelligence. Jemma Borg is no-one's kind of poet but her own and that's an extraordinary achievement.' Susan Wicks 'Borg makes us realise the vital connection between the human and the non-human, the physical and the psychological, the visible and the eclipsed. Like the collection's title, there is wildness and magic in these poems.' Jennifer Wong, The Poetry Review 'Borg's vision of the natural world crackles with life and beauty and, rather than bewildering us, reminds us that the open landscape offers freedom and possibility.' John Field, The T.S. Eliot Prize 'This collection considers not just the human impact on nature, nor the static observation of nature, nor even the post-human speakers of rocks or moss, but rather combines all these voices and points of view, and more, considers something inter-relational, to imagine all these elements coalescing and in conversation within a broader, holistic space. Between the joy of its noticings and the risks of its linguistic foraging, Wilder guides us through networks connecting and reconnecting to each other like root systems - a model for thinking perhaps, towards what we are still searching for.' SK Grout, Poetry School