‘Fluvial’ from ’Dorset Waterbodies, a Common / Weal’, Helen Moore
‘Fluvial’ is the final section of my landscape ecopoem ’Dorset Waterbodies, a Common / Weal’, which was made with the support of Arts Council England funding over the course of 2020/1. It was a commission for the RiverRun project led by Cape Farewell, a UK-based not-for-profit arts organisation, which has for many years focussed on the climate emergency by bringing scientists and artists together to develop a cultural response.
Located in and around Poole Bay and its watershed in Dorset, SW England, the RiverRun project has interrogated the way that land is farmed. Informed by the testimonies of organic farmers and the research of scientists (river ecologists, oceanographers, microbiologists) studying the rivers feeding into the bay, and their inhabitants (particularly the Salmon, who spawn upriver in delicate chalk streams), the five texts that comprise the poem voice the impacts of pollution and the climate crisis on the more-than-human world; they also point to people’s cooperative nature to inspire a collective response.
Finally, to note ‘commonweal’ is an archaic form of ‘commonwealth’, also meaning ‘the general welfare’. I use it as it contains the word ‘weal’, meaning ‘a red, swollen mark left on flesh by a blow or pressure’. The names of more-than-human beings are also capitalised to raise their status from the margins to which industrialised culture has relegated them.