From Our Own Fire

William Letford
(Carcanet, 2023); pbk, £14.99

‘Now the world’s broken I feel safer being surrounded by people who can put things together’ (‘Starlings’)

From Our Own Fire is William Letford’s third poetry collection, following Bevel (2012) and Dirt (2016). He was the winner of the New Writer’s Award from the Scottish Book Trust in 2008.

It is a concept collection of poems, telling the story of the Macallums’ surviving in a rural community after the rise of an Artificial Intelligence program called Andy. The collection itself is the journal of the stonemason, Joe, who has narrativised their experiences in prose on one page, and then written a corresponding poem on the next—making the overall collection an elegant mix of poetry and prose.

The structure and form of this collection is unique. Were the collection only the poems on the right page, the narrative drive and world that Letford has created would be flat. However, one must question the heavy lifting that the prose sections do. Were the poems read in isolation, they would be non-sensical and would not carry any poetic, linguistic, or formatic meaning for the reader. This poetry collection is exactly that, a collection to be read as a whole the way you would a novel.

Letford introduces the collection’s narrative concept somewhat shakily throughout the first half of the collection. The opening poem is set at a camp site. When read in context of the whole collection, one can see that they are nomads fleeing the structure of society, but when the reader is first introduced to them, this is read as a typical childhood memory of camping around a fire. Even after the first mentioning of Aritficial Intelligence, I had not realised this collection took place in the future. With the world so consumed by AI in 2024, I accepted the inclusion of AI in the poem as another facet of that. However, once we learn more about Andy, the Intelligence that has begun to infect the world, it becomes clear that Andy is a creation of Letford’s. But the nearness of this imagined future only makes Letford’s poignant discussions all the more startling and meaningful.

The second poem. ‘Starlings’, truly begins the world-building process of the narrative collection. Within ‘Starlings’ the reader learns that the ‘world’s broken’ and is introduced to the main characters of the collection: the Macallums. Furthermore, the poem, ‘Starlings’ is an excellent example of the tight form, narrative creation, and humour that Letford inserts into this collection:

The global economy is gone
Good. It was just
murmurations in the sky
Opulent and undecipherable
and occasionally
we’d get shat upon.

As the family flees an overruling Artificial Intelligence, the poems largely center on nature, the wild, and the finding of joy in these simple pleasures. The Macallums all work with their hands, as a ‘joiner, nurse, stonemason, hairdresser, plumber, gardener’ and Letford, perhaps connected to his previous career as a roofer, seems to advocate practical work, contrasted as it were with capitalism particularly. Still, Letford juxtaposes the family’s pastoral activities with scientific information from the outside world. In the corresponding prose section of ‘If I were Andy,’ we learn that Andy has ‘discovered evidence of alien life’. The poem is Joe’s imagining of what he would have done upon finding the probe if he were Andy:

I would have ignored
the Onsala Space Observatory
and made my own
miniscule telescopic arrays
Tied them to the legs of mites
Programmed them to send whispers
to the tiniest of tiny things
to let them know deep down in the endless forever
We can hear you
you are not alone[.]

Through this we gain a sense of Joe’s thoughts on Andy, and what he wishes for—perhaps to know that he is ‘not alone.’ At a time when AI seems to be on every news station, in every classroom and conversation, one may be hesitant to engage with it in poetry. However, Letford’s continued contrast between advances in science and the pastoral, and the emphasis on technical achievements, secures this collection as a meditation on the meaning of AI for humans, rather than an advocacy for greater advancement.

Taylor Jeoffroy