Wording, by Gregory Leadbetter

Wording: On Language and The Living World is an essay by poet Gregory Leadbetter exploring the capacity of poetry to re-vivify the language we use to describe the living world.

‘Language needs poetry to revive the relation between knowing and unknowing – to keep open the inlet of mystery.’

Wording presents a view of language grounded in its transnatural character: the self-altering, reality-altering qualities that constitute its fundamentally poetic power, by which it operates as a quickening agent of life itself. The essay aims to reveal and develop the poetics that constantly make and re-make our connection to other living forms, presenting poetry as the vital medium for the evolution of language that is necessary if we are to respond adequately to this time of ecological crisis. Re-examining ‘nature’ and ‘natural history’, Leadbetter revivifies our sense of these terms and the everyday process of naming.

The cover image is from ‘Fibre Figure’ (2004) by Julia Giles, an artist based in Cornwall who makes work about our relationship with living landscapes. ‘Fibre Figure’ is a digital drawing into a photograph of the artist’s shadow cast in vegetation, so that the landscape and the figure are indivisible.  See more on Giles’s website artworkjuliagiles.co.uk.