I Sing to the Greenhearts

Haunted by ghosts of colonial history, Maggie Harris’s I Sing to the Greenhearts challenges the dullness of the pastoral, unafraid to engage with Western art in critiquing how we view the environment. For example, ‘The Daydream, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’ reaches behind the beauty personified by the painter’s model to the reality of the wild. Writing on Pre-Raphaelite Joanna Mary Boyce’s Head of a Mulatto Woman, the black woman in the painting stands in for many resilient women – often mothers and grandmothers – that Harris finds in modern day life.Guyana’s Greenheart tree appears here as one of many plants with attitude, plants that know their history, plants bringing in the wild from the edges. They are transplants in a thriving Welsh garden, in poems such as ‘My Banana thinks on Louise Bennett’s “Colonisation in Reverse”’. Untamed nature lurks at the edges of the poems, through the disruption of migration, marriage, and re-settlement. Parakeets rehome in the UK. A lynx escapes from Ceredigion Zoo. The wild nourishes, evokes memory, reassures, and ties time and place together even as migration disturbs, upsets and challenges. I Sing to the Greenhearts presents a world where both ecological crisis and justice are at stake.