| “My existence, except as provider of sunflower hearts and peanuts, is unimportant” |
Places |
| Carly Holmes- Love Letters on the River , British Legion Hall Aberaeron & Parthian Books , August 7, 2025 |
The rivers of Wales run to the hundreds. The Teifi is not just the longest to rise and to meet the sea within Wales. It is the one with the most literary lustre. A half-millennium before the Romantics enthused about the Wye Gerald of Wales took delight in the Teifi. He called the river noble with the finest salmon to be had in Wales. He saw the fish ascend the cataract at Canarch Mawr. Their biggest leap was, he said, as as high as the longest spear or like a bow let loose. In 2022 Jim Perrin was at Cilgerran in his book “the River of Wales.” No longer the river of Gerald he saw how it “swirls brown and uninviting with the price of depleted salmon, sewin and trout." The phosphorus excess and the depletion of oxygen are cause for popular frustration. An exhibition has filled the Custom House Gallery in Cardigan and a book of verse followed. This was artistic endeavour from the community upwards. (The Arts Council of Wales has preferred a pecuniary embrace with the failing regulator. The Future Generations Commissioner averts his eyes.) The subject for a summer evening in Aberaeron is intended to be the celebration of the avian lives of the river in Carly Holmes' book. But she and host Niki Brewer of Gwisgo Bookworm Books cannot avoid the parlous condition of the water that is life to all. In July 2022 Mark Drakeford led a summit at the Royal Welsh Show to reduce pollution in the rivers of Wales. There may be some small betterment in the Teifi. Ospreys may be seen in the marshes below Cilgerran. There is likely fish sufficient for two adults, says Holmes. The appetites of chicks- three is the usual number- will not be met and the Dyfi estuary will probably call them. “Love Letters on the River” has had several points of genesis. Richard Davies of Parthian Books had essays on the river in mind. An osprey had once flown into a tree by the Ferry Inn at Saint Dogmaels. “I was completely besotted” says Holmes. The normal writer of fiction tried out a genre that was not her usual home. The Caught by the River Festival, a popular event in Cardigan, prompted Wales Arts Review to seek out a response in writing. Carly Holmes had debuted with some small prose pieces. The third element for the book is the artwork. Tenby artist Guy Manning has made bird and animal studies of a deep density of detail. The book is framed in end-papers of a beautiful red with a recurrent motif of swifts. Host and guest share a knowledge of birds which makes for a fullness of dialogue. Carly Holmes makes clear what her book is not. A glut of books has emerged in which the natural world provides solace for private sorrows. Nature here performs no such instrumental task. She is an admirer of Chloe Dalton's “Raising Hare.” The other-species existences that swirl around her Saint Dogmaels home for the last seventeen years are entities in their own right. The relationship is co-presence. “To meet them on their own terms. I don't want them to love me.” She points to a statement by philosopher John Gray from his “Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals”. A civilisation that thinks of itself as differentiated from the other myriad species is an outlier, and not the norm, in history. “Anyone who truly wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places”, he further writes “Instead of fleeing to desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will do better to seek out the company of other animals.” The dialogue turns to the passion of now that all experience, to every last item, must needs be captured via a lens. Birds are fleeting, fast , small creatures who elude the image-making of the pointed camera. The relationship is stated on the book's first page. “I don't view nature as a frame for humans and their preoccupations. It isn't there as a backdrop for the next Instagram post. It's not a theme park to be sampled on a day out.” What it is, by contrast, is its own world, where rhythms, rituals and behaviours acquired over aeons play out. The human can see the chain of nettle, caterpillar, blackbird, sparrowhawk. And the human role: “My existence, except as provider of sunflower hearts and peanuts, is unimportant.” Foxes and badgers haunt the garden by night. Owls hoot by an open skylight. The book moves a little from the river shore in time and space. An account of childhood into adolescence is given concisely and in unadorned manner. The birds vary in size. Canada geese group on the brown mud of the tidal river. In Cwm Gwaun ravens perform their sky-dance. A cross-bill is guessed at in Pantmaenog Forest. Hobbies circle at Cors Caron and feast on dragonflies. The cover of the book starts with flowers in yellow bloom and rises to a double bend in the river; the blues of water and sky meet. “Love Letters on the River” is an elevating marriage of words and images. It is a book rightly named, its last words reading: “It's given me a pure and profound pleasure to remember all of the encounters I've had with the creatures around me, and writing this has been a joy.” A guide to this sequence on places can be read in the first link below. Jim Perrin on the rivers of Wales can be read below 22 July 2022. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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