Where the Land Forgets Itself is Connor Sansby’s second full-length collection of poetry. It’s packed with strong publication credits, including ‘Marine Snow’, which won the 2024 Rosemary McLeish Prize.
Often using experimental language and structure, Where the Land Forgets Itself interrogates the vast and the intimate. This duality is evident in the poem ‘(Island)/dom’, where Sansby writes of ‘A band of clay / A linseed field. / The twinkling of a funeral pyre’ and ‘A gentle moan./ A whispered story. / A rock breaking itself apart.’
In this collection, the body dissolves into its environment—a theme echoed in the book’s blurb, where Sansby writes of ‘the boundaries of my body slowly dissolving. /Where the Land Forgets Itself is a book about erosion.’
The ideas in the collection seem to flow organically from one to the next, as though built brick by brick, or like stepping stones. Sansby’s skill with language gives the sense that he could write about anything, and it’s refreshing to encounter a unified poetry collection rooted in a few core themes, rather than a mere assortment of poems.
A collision of myth and modern living can be seen in this book. It is timely to write about Margate when it is going through great regeneration, or gentrification, during its discovery and rediscovery. Margate has made headlines for this increasingly. This collection tells an economic and social story. In ‘Hy-Brasil’ Sansby writes, ‘Your body drives down/the property value;/the greatest crime.’ This is followed with, ‘Unearned wealth is the same/as stealing in their eyes.’
If Where the Land… is a book about the sea, it’s also a book about the sun; more specifically, it’s destruction. This can be seen in the poem ‘Preface to Disassembling Sunlight’ where Sansby writes ‘I have known light to be rough and coarse.’ There is an acceptance of destruction here, even a desire to be consumed.
The poem ‘Tombstoning’ is a delicious misery in the mould of your favourite grunge album growing up. This collection feels like a favourite album, like something to indulge in.
There are some interesting references in this collection, from T.S. Eliot to American Psycho, and it’s a wonderful thing to acknowledge works that have inspired you at the end of your collection for further reading. More poetry collections should do this.
Where the Land Forgets Itself is both humorous and subversive. It leaves the reader questioning: What is material? What is reality? It is a fundamental quizzing of everything where nothing is assumed but pain, and beauty.
This book is available here payhip.com
Setareh Ebrahimi is an Iranian-British poet. She has published two collections, In My Arms and Galloping Horses. Setareh was an editor at Whisky & Beards Press, a reviewer at Confluence magazine and an editor at Thanet Writers.