Glyn Maxwell’s Extinction Songs is a suite of poems written for extremely rare creatures. They were listed among the hundred most threatened beings on Earth by the World Conservation Congress of 2012, since when a small handful of the species have bounced back, but most have continued to dwindle, and at least one has departed forever.
The causes – habitat loss, climate change, deforestation, pollution, poison, disease – can almost all be laid at the door of Mankind – and it is Man-kind under the searching spotlight here. For who is this Man, this proud human male, who treats the world as his alone, before whom the air, the water, the soil, Nature itself seem to have to turn, to wither, become tainted and befouled? In the fifteen years since these creatures were named, the realms of the human have sickened too, from fragile dreams of freedom and justice to new manifestations of violence, deception, ignorance and greed, fuelled by a mindless technology and the cowardice of the mighty in the face of life’s beautiful complexity.
The poems were written throughout the summer, autumn and winter of 2024, symbolising the conditions of time racing towards a dark horizon. There is heartbreak, mortality, and a terrible dawn in America. Through songs and sonnets, elegies, monologues, green hymns and black comedies and shaggy-dog stories, a wild array of forms are brought to bear on the plight of these birds, beasts and flowers. But the figure taking its turn in the cross-hairs is that of Man Himself, blithe and brutal and ever learning nothing,in whose name these catastrophes continue to unfold.
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