Near Future

Suzannah Evans

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781911027461
• eBook ISBN: 9781911027645
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Suzannah Evans' debut collection Near Future is doom-pop-poetry with an apocalyptic edge, a darkly humorous journey through sci-fi lullabies and northern mysteries. This is a future simulation stripped of the space-age gloss of progression - one where the robots have gone rogue and the hopes of a new millennium are malfunctioning; this is a skewed yet oddly familiar world gone uncannily wrong.
These playful, sharp, poems are also about more than dystopias and five types of possible apocalypse - in looking at the worst-case scenarios, Evans comes closer to the bigger narrative; universal truths of change, whether man-made or natural, preventable of inevitable, and the uncertain business of human existence where 'there are disasters that you cannot prepare yourself for'. Evans brings a distinctive, skilful and wonderfully peculiar roving eye to our restless and unpredictable times.

Future Cities

1. The Censored City

The municipal workers paint the dead grass

back to its original colour each night.

The mouths of rush-hour pedestrians

are stopped with facemasks.

Internet searches for painted grass

or municipal workers turn up nothing.

On the grassland that belts the city

are sheep, cows, horses and camels.

The grazing ones don’t look up

and those with their eyes raised

keep on staring into the distance

where factories fill the sky with clouds.

In strong winds the herds are known

to blow onto their backs, collect in piles

with a hollow clunking like patio furniture

until somebody comes to stand them back up.

2. The Floating City

We got away in the early hours, split the difference

half way across the shopping-centre car park.

We heard the creak of land goodbye-ing land

above the air conditioning of pre-work gyms

as we ran and cycled from no place to another.

Signals switched just in time. Trains nosed

end to end along the station platform. The ocean

sprang out before us like a pop-up tent.

We travelled rudderless with a following wind

trailing power lines and manhole-ladders.

To Scandinavia! Announced the Master Navigator.

We googled the attractions. From the top

of Cemetery Hill we watched whales, each one

its own land-mass. The motorway was nothing

but a frayed edge. The Chief Cartographer

placed a long-distance call for more blue.

3. The Plug-In City

After Peter Cook and Archigram

It has travelled through the night

leaving nothing behind it

but the folded yellow grass

of its former pitch.

It reconfigures with a few neat clicks.

Citizens shift a little in their bunks

as pipes split the new ground, descend

into aquifers

send water glugging

around the system in bright blue tubes.

It will be mid-morning

before they strike oil.

Cargo doors zip open

releasing livestock to graze freely

while the sun comes up

and the plug-in citizens wake

to take in the view and certified air

from morning balconies.

Today they will perfect their bodies

on rows of hospital-clean gym machines.

As they shake their dynamo watches

to a new timezone

and wait for their omelettes

they look down at the territory

imagining how it might feel

if they went outside

the sun and grit

against their indoor skins.

This is England’s greenest city

trees are expensive

*

in the freezing breath of 6am

we joined hands around a threatened trunk

they took our flasks of tea away

arrested two

retired academics

*

they’ve brought in licensed

security guards

hi-vis mouths-to-feeds

who don’t get politically involved

quick to put their hands

on troublemakers

fell them to their knees

in the leafy mud

*

we’ve never seen the guns

used, only postured

*

we have to care from a distance

questioning the brutal origins

of every petition we print

*

house arrest

I haven’t touched a tree for three weeks

the council are taking away street furniture

to reduce upkeep

*

the traffic lights are gone—in their place

four ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Epigraph
• A Contingency Plan
• The Doomer’s Daughter
• Helpline
• The Handover
• Roboblackbird
• Summer with Robobees
• The Dark Museum
• We just passed on the street
• This is The End
• The End of the End of the World
• Sometimes in your own head
• Wholly Communion
• Real Time
• The New Tenants
• The Law of Attraction
• The New Curriculum
• Future Cities
• This is England’s greenest city
• This morning the walls
• The Russian Woodpecker
• Reconstructing the Monument
• Underground in the new Meanwood
• The Taste
• Guided Tour
• Wyre
• Trevor on the Long Mynd
• About the Dog
• Naming the Hill
• Coastal Erosion
• Extinct Scents
• De-Extinction
• Skies Recorded by the Cyanometer
• The Fatbergs
• The Humans and the Starlings
• Re-wilding
• Craters
• Letter into Eternity
• The Last Poet-in-Residence
• Acknowledgements
• About the author & this book