Only connect
Louisa Thomsen Brits’ Path narrates place and personhood through poems that make ‘a short story about reciprocity’. This small book treads lightly through wide scapes of spirit and land; beginning with a quote from Robert Macfarlane: “paths connect. This is their first duty and their chief reason for being.” Perhaps all beings (human/non-human) are also paths: expressions of particularity and process; routes and roots to our essential connections.
I am footfall and track,
trail and trace,
thread of passage and possibility.
Trodden-through with a region-specific ‘word hoard’, Path is both intensely local to those paths Brit walks and universally translatable to our own natural geographies, histories, biographies.
I offer to make sense of the world,
to unravel tangle to intelligible thread,
I am your next natural step,
a silent, sinuous course stretching ahead of you...
Wildlife and landscape infuse text, drawings and photographs: the crows — “tar-black tricksters lit with life”; “a sudden skylark, selved in song”; the “wind-bent age-black hawthorn … keeper of the beacon, remnant of woodland”.
Path‘s counsel is timeless: “Walk with me”, “Yield to me”, “Follow me”, “Cast off your cares”, “Stand still. Look back”, “Walk, only walk”, “Walk into the land.”
Our path grows wider,
wilder.