‘Fluvial’ from ’Dorset Waterbodies, a Common / Weal’, Helen
Moore
‘Fluvial’ is the final section of my landscape ecopoem
’Dorset Waterbodies, a Common /
Weal’, which was made with the support of Arts Council England funding
over the course of 2020/1. It was a commission for the RiverRun project
led by Cape Farewell, a UK-based not-for-profit arts organisation, which
has for many years focussed on the climate emergency by bringing
scientists and artists together to develop a cultural response.
Located in and around Poole Bay and its watershed in Dorset, SW England,
the RiverRun project has interrogated the way that land is farmed.
Informed by the testimonies of organic farmers and the research of
scientists (river ecologists, oceanographers, microbiologists) studying
the rivers feeding into the bay, and their inhabitants (particularly the
Salmon, who spawn upriver in delicate chalk streams), the five texts
that comprise the poem voice the impacts of pollution and the climate
crisis on the more-than-human world; they also point to people’s
cooperative nature to inspire a collective response.
Finally, to note ‘commonweal’ is an archaic form of ‘commonwealth’, also
meaning ‘the general welfare’. I use it as it contains the word ‘weal’,
meaning ‘a red, swollen mark left on flesh by a blow or pressure’. The
names of more-than-human beings are also capitalised to raise their
status from the margins to which industrialised culture has relegated
them.