Situated where salt and freshwater meet, where floods and fields 'mingle
parts', Emily Hasler's second collection exposes the dailiness of
disaster to chart the constantly shifting courses of rivers and lives.
Taking its name from the sections of libraries where much of Hasler's
research began*, Local Interest* maps the friable and slippery
landscapes of south Suffolk and north Essex: estuaries and water
meadows, coastal defences and disused decoys, possible futures and
forgotten pasts.
This is a book of habitats lost, created and threatened, teeming with
plants, people, animals and 'legless, uneyed life'. Here are
promontories, precarity and potential; the first English sea battle and
a forgotten stuntman; rare and familiar birds; a fish die-off and a
vanished world; a historic earthquake and continuous erosion. Moments
and millennia are as muddled as the elements. In these poems nothing is
pure and everything is borrowed. Language is hybrid; poems are 'stolen'
and 'observed'.
Local Interest questions boundaries and belonging, squinting at ideas of
invasion and migration, borders and crossings. It asks what is 'local'
and to whom; how we might celebrate dwelling while looking beyond
permanence and ownership.
This is poetry that wallows at the muddy edges of things, that asks you
to follow it 'through every breach that was and could be'.
