Scale

By Mina Gorji

At the volcano's edge, in exilic space, at the bottom of the Arctic Sea, or in the acid clouds of Venus, Mina Gorji's Scale traces life at its limits. The poems range across scales of distance, temperature and time, from vast to minute, glacial to volcanic, Pleistocene to present day, constellation to millipede. Adapting to the cold of a new continent opens a chromatic investigation of feeling. Shifting between scales, from insect to ancient star, Scale explores the forms, conditions and frequencies of survival.Scale builds on the considerable achievement of Gorji's first book, Art of Escape (2019). When it was selected for the Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month, Tristram Fane Saunders noted Gorji's 'meticulous explorations' of 'the strange and sometimes darker side of nature' and 'the different forms and meanings of escape: dandelions crossing the ocean, the journey of a gall wasp from Aleppo to England, the transformation of an armadillo into music.'Gorji's poems feed into current ecological concerns, but in no conventional or clichéd way. Marina Warner described her poems as 'building a place of safety for herself, her family, her readers, and all those who are wandering and uprooted; her poetic methods take their cue from the many marvellous creatures she evokes and the multiple protective measures they adopt nests, camouflage, mimicry, display. Above all, language can help create shelter.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Sep 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781800172159

Mina Gorji

Mina Gorji was born in Iran and lives in Cambridge. Her debut, Art of Escape (Carcanet, 2020), was a Telegraph 'Book of the Month'. Her poems were selected for the Forward Book of Poetry and Bloodaxe's Staying Human anthology. She has also written a study of John Clare's poetry, and essays on weeds, rudeness, little things and listening; a lyric-critical essay, 'Listening for Stars', was published in Poetry Review (2021). She is Associate Professor at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Pembroke College.

Book preview

A red door opens

into snow –

what to leave behind?

a bangle (gold)

a pearl –

an offering

for the threshold

left behind.

In ice

they found a wolf

intact, its face

and fur still legible

after forty thousand years.

Cold preserves the living,

for a time,

slowing the heart

to almost still.

Snow will fall

covering our tracks,

ice crystalise

inside our bones.

What can survive

the glacier’s

advance?

All winter long

the wood frogs lie in wait,

frozen so hard

if dropped,

they’d clink.

Inside their cells

something is waiting,

waiting for spring –

a change of key

before they wake

and sing

in high-pitched chirps

and peeps and trills

that settle, for a moment,

into something

like a pattern.

MRI

Inside the