Richard's APE: Accidental Poems of Extinction

What was it like to experience at close hand a dramatic battle between two aurochs bulls 15,000 years ago in the prehistoric marshes which are now the coastline of Wales? We don't know, because they're extinct.To watch a pair of woolly rhinoceroses mating less than a mile from where Lyme Regis stands today? We don't know, because they're extinct.To come across an Irish elk helplessly mired in a bog thousands of years before Ireland was separated from the mainland? We don't know, because they're extinct.To be awed by the unexpected emergence right before our eyes, from a hawthorn wood above what is now Loch Ness, of one of the last straight-tusked elephants to walk the earth? We don't know, because they're extinct.Kailu, a Palaeolithic cave artist, does know, because he's experienced all of these and more while the species still exist. This little volume contains fifteen sonnets that Kailu would have written if Kailu could write, set within the landscapes that eventually become the British Isles, with each sonnet recounting a meeting between the cave artist and an iconic animal species which humankind later exterminates.Kailu is a character in the novel Rewilding Richard, and the poems of his experiences as he crosses the icy westernmost lands of the untamed European continent appear fully-formed in the notebook of the protagonist of the novel's title. Richard, who has flown from Australia to Britain to 'rewild' himself in landscapes being ecologically restored, is flabbergasted to discover the poems in his own handwriting and can't recall writing any of them. These fifteen sonnets are a reminder of the tsunami of hundreds and thousands of extinctions occurring worldwide in our Anthropocene age, and a cry for humans of the 21st century to set aside half of Earth's surface for wildness, to give our remaining wild species a chance of survival and our threatened planet the capacity to heal itself.Sonnets don't have to be fourteen lines. Some of these sonnets take inspiration from master-sonneteers of the past and have twenty lines, or ten, and rhyme, or not. Rules in poetry are meant to be broken, just as in life, even when it appals the rule-bound most.Opposite each sonnet there is a brief note about the animal we have lost, and a quick life lesson for humans from its life or its death.