The heart your only compass

OMOBOLA OSAMOR welcomes new, hard-hitting ecopoetry collection

Helen Moore has been writing eco-poetry long before the genre started attracting popular attention. She co-authored a bilingual poetry collection and three single-author eco-poetry collections.

Her latest, The Last Lighthouse in Rising Seas (Palewell Press, 2026) comprises 67 poems, each a page in an unfolding story of a dying earth. Fossil fuels are the dominant cause of global warming, accounting for 89% of carbon dioxide emissions. Somalia and Ethiopia continue to suffer from multi-year severe droughts. Low-lying island nations like the Maldives continue to face increased sea level rises and ocean acidification. In Australia, unprecedented ocean warming has led to devastating mass coral bleaching events. From land subsidence caused by flooding in Jakarta, Indonesia, to the eroding ocean landscape of Alaska, USA, nowhere is spared.

These poems are a call to action.

Solastalgia. An emotional/existential distress caused by negatively perceived environmental changes. A distinction can be made between it as the lived experience of negatively perceived change in the present, and eco-anxiety, linked to worry/concern about what may happen in the future, a recurring thread running through this beautiful patchwork collection from genesis to the end.

Rainache describes a landscape in the aftermath of drought: 'I ache like an ovulating woman / without a lover [...] / snails are fevered mouths / glued to walls. Grass has changed to straw.' Empty nest syndrome uses memory to gauge the present while straddling the past, 'in the sorrows of remembrance you yearn [….] / Yet summer skies are almost empty.'

Little ships describes the fracturing of self when home becomes dangerous, and survival determines flight: a migrant's journey through war, famine, drought and perilous seas. It's up close and personal like entries from a journal, an open-ended end, 'Not once did you look back […] / the heart your only compass.' Madonna & Child, portrait in blue, reads like a response to the latter in its capturing the day-to-day of refugees whilst queuing at Moria's squalid camp (ex-military on Lesbos, Greece).

The house next door, a colourful picture of the past, 'primrose yellow walls still look newly painted', cuts to the door, 'midriff flap ingests ads, part campaigns, religious tracts'. An idyllic past 'ingested' in the present. Carpet beater describes the trauma of domestic violence passed down through generations. The long stalk, three spirals: grandmother-mother-daughter. 'Was this how she channelled fury […] / How she handled blows that rained on her / from father & husband?'

Market forces describes the gentrification of a beloved neighbourhood. The constant pull of demand and the erosion of the natural inhabitants to supply for profit, 'you too are leaving town […]  / habitats cut, polluted, lost'.

Love Miles is a rendition of love's nonlinearity and messiness. The tearful awe at the consequence of choices; the distance between self and those you love deeply,

'Where will we arrive?' It asks.

‘Us with all this mystery / & the frailties of our attachments ….’?

Tales of an Australian opal describes visiting a dying beloved who bequeaths a gift: 'the teardrop flashes like / fire on water as it tumbles into my palm'. Helen Moore pays homage to the fabled beginning while acknowledging its journey. 'Lucky opal, I wear you proudly despite miners' silicosis, / ravaged Country, wounded souls.'

Approaching Britain, necropolitics, 2017, catalogues a few of the hundreds of thousands killed in the 'slow violence' of structural conditions denigrating human life, particularly asylum seekers. The house is on fire, screams the earth is dying. It ends like Greta Thunberg's bold address: 'Your inaction is fueling the flames by the hour. We are telling you to act as if you loved your children above all else.'

Wanting it to rain so much explores the discombobulation of a drought, the desiccation of the landscape, 'farmers on their knees, taking their lives'. Houses are lost, food is gone. Picture after picture of tragedy.

At times, the poems are lyrical, 'let our bodies become fluid dancing soft as drops of / rain'; at times, a day basking in familial love, 'I hug her so long, so hard, / I could be clutching the slender frame of a raft.'

At times, they are the remnant of a fevered dream, 'I blink, drawing threads […]  like a / fine net wet filled with silver.'

Secret economies of English houses felt like voyeuristic glimpses into the early days of Covid-19. A black bird feeding her young in an enclave surrounded by scraps of plastic. The beauty of nature is disrupted by human pollution. Nature struggles to stay alive despite the greed of encroachment. Petronarcosis begins by excusing the plundering of the earth's resources. 'If we didn't do it, someone else would.'

P is for Play delves into machinery stripping nature, comparing the violence to a blade stripping the scalp from the skull. Spectrogram, Sparrows highlights the effects of fossil fuels on the brains and vocal ranges of sparrows, mice, and man: 'one man grows ill […] / symptoms flock into his body.' This is a recurring theme in The hen house: a teenager works in a poultry farm and sees himself in his charges—broken bodies, compared to his broken wrist sustained while at work. Yet he carries on 'trading his distress for crumbs'.

Petroleum, a distillation is arranged in the shape of a distiller. A show-and-tell on how petroleum is used in our everyday lives: cutlery, creaseless sheets, pants, and so on. Auto eroticism, a petrolhead's onanistic dreams, reads like scenes from a noir movie. 'Onastic,' an adjective that pertains to the practice of coitus interruptus, is descriptive behaviour that is excessively self-absorbed and fruitlessly self-indulgent, and completely disconnected from external reality. Tailback is traffic short on the power behind a motorist held hostage in the congestion. Stop, look, think.

Thom's Co-op Bike Café & Workshop, an ode to several people choosing their bicycles, a human-powered and eco-friendly mode of transportation precedes Skip on school runs. 'My partner and I have given up our car […] / we go everywhere on bikes. Or take the train.'

'The choice to live simply […] / so others may simply live.'

What the Owls say is a soliloquy of the bird of night whose home has been encroached upon by humans, while Of poets' tools forlornly compares the frustrations of writer's block to 'words seared & cracked with hydrocarbons'. Auto/mobile is a sharp side-eye on keeping up with the Joneses.

The disruption caused by pollution from fossil fuels, and our collective conscious or unconscious indifference, has left wastelands where flora and fauna once flourished. The Last Lighthouse in Rising Seas uses memory to create an album of where we were and where we are, and it places a mirror unflinchingly before our faces while predicting where we are going. This collection is a great tool for sensitising and driving policies to shore up our collective futures.