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

Polyp

vagabond Press (2024)

Highly Commended in the 2024 Five Islands Prize

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 provides a fresh reading experience and proposes a new ecology of how language works. The collection is playful in form and deeply serious in how it offers us pause to feel and see the world anew. Though minimal in length, this collection swells with deep echoes of resonance. The reading experience is akin to wandering through an art exhibition or immersion in music. It acts as an artful field guide as to how we might attend differently to the relationship between the human and more than human world.' —2024 FIVE ISLANDS PRIZE JUDGES' REPORT

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