The Island in the Sound

In his meditative third collection, Campbell (Noctuary) brings to vivid life the land and sea that defined his youth in the Outer Hebrides, interweaving references to ancient myths and the effects of climate change on the natural world and its inhabitants. There are several thematic series in the collection, including poems centered around jobs the speaker once held on the islands. “Apprenticeship” describes the work of sorting the catches of crabbers: “Hours, you would weigh/ by hand and eye and a slow part of the mind,// young jeweller at a tray of breathing stones.” Many poems feature animals—the threat against them, but equally their remarkable endurance—and there is an abiding Blakean metaphysics throughout, as in “Theology”: “I would explain the soul like this:/ as whisky in the barrel cask—/ that light caught. Grained, proofed, stored and kept/ bound in a dark in wonderment.” While the subject matter can be bleak, an existential exuberance permeates, the tone set by the opening poem, which quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins’s last words: “I am so Happy. I am so Happy. I Loved my Life.” As long as there is life on Earth, there is beauty to admire and reason to persevere, Campbell suggests. This offers an essential glimmer of hope in the dark night of the late Anthropocene. (Nov.)