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A New Earth
Dec. 20th, 2024 10:00 amWatts, JS, 2012, Songs of Steelyard Sue, Lapwing Publications, lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com
http://www.freewebs.com/lapwingpoetry/, ISBN 978-1-909252-02-8, 24 p. This is a print publication, but I reviewed a PDF file. £10.00 plus shipping, or $22 from Amazon.
Songs of Steelyard Sue is a small book of 12 poems about Steelyard Sue, a metal inheritor of our world. Two of the poems were previously published elsewhere. I gotta tell ya, as I was reading this book I kept silently saying to myself, “that couldn't happen,” or “that violates the laws of physics” and so on. I fully intended to not write a review. But somehow I couldn't do that. I couldn't dislike these poems. J. S. Watts didn't write a science fiction book, in which robots are supposed to do only those things robots plausibly could do. Even though it is about a robot. This is, at its most scientific, perhaps a science fantasy book. Of course it is really about a lonely woman, the last person on earth, if a robot who admits that she has no heart and no human soul is a person. Whatever she isn't, she is, at least, a gardener, even in the absence of plant life.
_I bent the wire
in pretty shapes
and made flower faces
from black rubber scraps.
I saw a bird there, once,
perching on a sonic shell._
(From “Steelyard Sue Plants a Garden”)
Sue is alone, the Earth is nearly a lifeless place, but she isn't completely alone. Metaphorically speaking, there are a few knocks on the door:
_It sat there for two days,
stone-like, good as dead,
until, on the third day,
I found the stone moved,
the toad gone,_
(from “Toad”)
And isn't that a hell of a thing? Did Jesus come back in the form of a toad? And Steelyard Sue, a seeker, but not human and not having a soul, didn't recognize him? Or is this allusion really just a cheap joke? I suspect the latter. The thing is, I like Sue. I like her voice. She doesn't know much about our world, but she's trying. She doesn't know how things are supposed to work, but she has a very strong sense of right and wrong, and wants to do right. The writing is lyrical and the story is a real human one, about an amateur self-taught archaeologist marooned all alone on a desert island 26,000 miles in circumference.
_Sometimes I go to church
three or four times a day. There are so many abandoned here,
churches, that is,_
[and]
_I once found a place,
multi-layered, open to the sky,
where rows and rows of cars
waited their turn in silence_
(From “Steelyard Sue Goes to Church”)
Sue doesn't really know what a church was, and she can't tell a church from a parking garage, but she knows they were important to us in a non-tangible way. She tries to experience them the way we did. She is doomed to failure, and she knows that, but she isn't anything by herself. She exists in relationship to our vanished species.
_A woman of many parts, all man-made
and without a human soul,
not even the soft-skin touch of polished chrome.
I make no concession to organic,
the full moon has no pull upon me.
All I am is corners, sharps and rust:_
(From “The Last Lament of Steelyard Sue”)
Sue is a post-human commentator, solitary, strangely knowledgeable about some of our affairs, yet profoundly ignorant of others. She isn't independent of us. She was not made by us, but she was assembled out of what we left behind. The funny thing about Sue, is that she is also a sort of bridge. A bridge between the human world and a robot world about which she knew nothing, because it came to be when she was already gone. Exactly how this happened is not explained either, but it does provide an explanation for the book. The poems are what the robot world knows about Sue. We don't learn much about the robot world, but we do get the sense that there is a real society, developed at some future time with no direct reference to us. Instead, the robots refer back to a legendary past in which Sue was the only inhabitant.
http://www.freewebs.com/lapwingpoetry/, ISBN 978-1-909252-02-8, 24 p. This is a print publication, but I reviewed a PDF file. £10.00 plus shipping, or $22 from Amazon.
Songs of Steelyard Sue is a small book of 12 poems about Steelyard Sue, a metal inheritor of our world. Two of the poems were previously published elsewhere. I gotta tell ya, as I was reading this book I kept silently saying to myself, “that couldn't happen,” or “that violates the laws of physics” and so on. I fully intended to not write a review. But somehow I couldn't do that. I couldn't dislike these poems. J. S. Watts didn't write a science fiction book, in which robots are supposed to do only those things robots plausibly could do. Even though it is about a robot. This is, at its most scientific, perhaps a science fantasy book. Of course it is really about a lonely woman, the last person on earth, if a robot who admits that she has no heart and no human soul is a person. Whatever she isn't, she is, at least, a gardener, even in the absence of plant life.
_I bent the wire
in pretty shapes
and made flower faces
from black rubber scraps.
I saw a bird there, once,
perching on a sonic shell._
(From “Steelyard Sue Plants a Garden”)
Sue is alone, the Earth is nearly a lifeless place, but she isn't completely alone. Metaphorically speaking, there are a few knocks on the door:
_It sat there for two days,
stone-like, good as dead,
until, on the third day,
I found the stone moved,
the toad gone,_
(from “Toad”)
And isn't that a hell of a thing? Did Jesus come back in the form of a toad? And Steelyard Sue, a seeker, but not human and not having a soul, didn't recognize him? Or is this allusion really just a cheap joke? I suspect the latter. The thing is, I like Sue. I like her voice. She doesn't know much about our world, but she's trying. She doesn't know how things are supposed to work, but she has a very strong sense of right and wrong, and wants to do right. The writing is lyrical and the story is a real human one, about an amateur self-taught archaeologist marooned all alone on a desert island 26,000 miles in circumference.
_Sometimes I go to church
three or four times a day. There are so many abandoned here,
churches, that is,_
[and]
_I once found a place,
multi-layered, open to the sky,
where rows and rows of cars
waited their turn in silence_
(From “Steelyard Sue Goes to Church”)
Sue doesn't really know what a church was, and she can't tell a church from a parking garage, but she knows they were important to us in a non-tangible way. She tries to experience them the way we did. She is doomed to failure, and she knows that, but she isn't anything by herself. She exists in relationship to our vanished species.
_A woman of many parts, all man-made
and without a human soul,
not even the soft-skin touch of polished chrome.
I make no concession to organic,
the full moon has no pull upon me.
All I am is corners, sharps and rust:_
(From “The Last Lament of Steelyard Sue”)
Sue is a post-human commentator, solitary, strangely knowledgeable about some of our affairs, yet profoundly ignorant of others. She isn't independent of us. She was not made by us, but she was assembled out of what we left behind. The funny thing about Sue, is that she is also a sort of bridge. A bridge between the human world and a robot world about which she knew nothing, because it came to be when she was already gone. Exactly how this happened is not explained either, but it does provide an explanation for the book. The poems are what the robot world knows about Sue. We don't learn much about the robot world, but we do get the sense that there is a real society, developed at some future time with no direct reference to us. Instead, the robots refer back to a legendary past in which Sue was the only inhabitant.
