Salt, Snow, Earth

Salt bites Snow.
Snow slaps Earth.
Earth pounds Salt.

And so it goes, on and on and on
round and round in every shade of hand
— claw-teeth, hard palm, fist —

Salt, Snow, Earth, Snow, Earth, Salt
Bite, Slap, Pound. Slap, Pound, Bite

A game to get the blood up.
Heart pumping. Skin singing.
No breath or time to ask

Whose bodies are blanketed?
Whose bodies blanked out?
What are the odds white wins?

Salt & Snow is the title of Naomi Foyle’s latest poetry collection. If they haven’t done so already, some judging committee somewhere should shortlist it for a significant prize. Impressively varied and agile in form, international in scope, Salt & Snow is as emotionally rich as it is politically alert, drawing strength from its predominant genre, the elegy.

The “in memoriam” poems lament both individuals known privately to the poet, and public “names” including author and art critic John Berger, poet Lee Harwood and US police murder victim George Floyd. There is no significant difference in Foyle’s approach: what particularly distinguishes all the elegies is the depth of imaginative empathy brought to bear on the various lives and deaths. Foyle, who has recovered from cancer, writes not only from the awareness of death as an individual tragedy, especially when “untimely”, but as the common prospect of all organisms. Her visionary prose poem The Dark Earth concludes its life-enhancing list of fruits and flowers, and how to cultivate and eat them, with their horrific metamorphosis into dangerous threats: “Should they persist, hack with knives and machetes, chop down and string up, beat with bats, iron bars, hurl from tall towers, crush, burn, behead. Ditch their remains in the earth you call dirt.” This poem has an unusual dedication: “i.m. all those cut down due to their nature” and it expresses another essential theme of the collection, the political creation of the enemy who justifies the forces of destruction.

This week’s poem adds “earth” to the “salt” and “snow” of the title and the title poem. The latter is one of the “public” elegies, written in memory of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, the child who was “poisoned with salt” by his mother and whose death became an impossible subject of conversation: “Our silence / is a coverlet / of snow // on a looted grave – // white as salt.” These images are scattered across the book’s main section. Salt is especially significant and takes various forms: it’s the ammonium nitrate (“that white synthetic salt”) which exploded with devastating effect in a Beirut warehouse on 4 August 2020, and also a vital ingredient in the “bottle of Tajín” which George Floyd’s ex-girlfriend was keeping for the meal they hoped to share on their “first post-lockdown meet-up”.

Snow, Salt, Earth initially enacts a process of stripping down. The symbolic substances are introduced in brief sentences, stating the effect of one upon the other, anaphora emphasising the chant of a “game”. The effects are not necessarily negative: salt is useful for melting snow, snow may “slap” earth without destroying it, salt is vitally important to life. But the implicit metaphor of a relentless game develops in the tercet: “And so it goes, on and on and on / round and round in every shade of hand …” The hand then shape-shifts into various weapons: “— claw-teeth” (suggesting the cruelty of fingernails), “hard palm, fist —”. Now syntax is abandoned: the pace accelerates as the couplet divides, as if in a battle with itself, into a line of nouns and a line of verbs, percussive monosyllables belted out like punches. If this were a sonnet (I’m leaving the interpretation open), verse three would mark an upheaval of a “turn”. Subsequently the speaker, perhaps not wholly ironically, shows violence becoming exciting and addictive. Words are put together again, though not yet as full sentences: “A game to get the blood up. / Heart pumping. Skin singing.”

Formal grammar restored, the questions there will be “no breath or time to ask” occupy the final tercet. It makes a clear distinction between the snow that “blankets” and somehow comforts a surface, and the snow that erases it, “blanks” it. That surface implicitly becomes a scene of annihilation: it may be a political arena in which the crimes of a state against its people are concealed and those who ask questions are disappeared. As if exhausted by what it has enacted, the poem now seems to drop a tone in pitch, into the angry sarcasm of despair: “What are the odds white wins?” The whiteness left on the page provides the only answer to the question.

I was struck by the uncanny prescience of that line when I re-read the collection a few months ago. It was coincidentally after I’d watched the video of the confrontation between presidents Zelenskyy and Trump over the future of Ukraine. Trump had told Zelenskyy, “You don’t have the cards right now”, and Zelenskyy replied: “We’re not playing cards.” “You’re gambling with World War Three,” Trump insisted. The memory of that snarling battle over a familiar metaphor immediately rose in my mind when I re-read Salt, Snow, Earth, giving the poem’s conclusion a strong additional thrust. This resonance persists with the daily reminders of the “gambling” element in missile-strikes, for instance, which are often not as predictable as claimed. The line has a further significance as a reminder of the “supremacist” racial assumptions behind war.

Salt, Snow, Earth has been re-imagined as the compelling “poemfilm” below in a collaboration between Razia Aziz, Wendy Pye and the poet herself. Their work combines exciting vocal and instrumental sounds, brilliantly woven imagery and some stunning physical theatre.