There is
some lovely stuff in it, with a particularly brilliant section about messages
in bottles, sent to no one in particular across 'the mother of all dead letter boxes: the sea'. It
is also salutary to learn that 'caffeine levels are so high in some coastal
areas that it's used as a marker to determine general water quality'. And I
learnt a lot about a science I had never even heard of: Flotsametrics. In his
book Flotsametrics and the Floating world (2009), Curtis Ebbesmeyer explores
the science behind the complex and unlikely journeys taken by ocean debris like
driftwood, messages in bottles, corpses and derelict ships, as well as 'the
Great Sneaker spill' - when thousands of lost-overboard Nike training shoes
ended up on distant shores. Apparently, 'murderers often underestimate the
strength and complexity of currents and tidal systems, a failure which has
sabotaged many an otherwise "perfect" crime.'
Searching for some of Sprackland's poems, I found this suitably lyrical
reworking of the everyday on her website:
Mattresses
Tipped down the embankment, they
sprawl like sloshed suburban wives,
sprawl like sloshed suburban wives,
buckled and split, slashed by rain,
moulded by bodies dead or disappeared
and reeking with secrets.
A lineside museum of sleep and sex,
an archive of thrills and emissions,
the histories of half-lives
spent hiding in the dark.
Arthritic iron frames might still be worth a bit,
but never that pink quilted headboard,
naked among thistles, relic
of some reckless beginning, testament
to the usual miracle: the need to be close,
however it stains and bruises.
from Tilt (Cape ,
2007)
I did a very middle class thing and had John Lewis collect my old mattress recently, and they told me that even the oldest of mattresses can be recycled: shredded and used as filling.
ReplyDeletenice posting.. thanks for sharing.
ReplyDelete