Eliza O’Toole – Laurel Prize: Below the Surface

Welcome to our Laurel Prize: Below the Surface for the 2025 Laurel Prize finalists. These pieces shine a light on the creative practice behind these outstanding collections. We are also intrigued to know how nature and the climate crisis influenced the authors’ process. Here’s Eliza O’Toole on her collection A Cranic of Ordinaries. 

Writing as the tip of the iceberg 

How did I write A Cranic of Ordinaries? It is a good question in that the actual writing is the tip of the iceberg for me. Expression in language is a bit like a ribbon around a cake. First bake the cake, but before that, gather the ingredients.

How I went about gathering the ingredients for making A Cranic of Ordinaries.  

No-one talks without thinking first, do they?  For me, 99% of writing is not writing at all. It is thinking.  So I might re-frame that question.  How did I go about thinking A Cranic of Ordinaries, or to put it another way, gathering its ingredients?

Well, that’s about a practice of poetry.  My practice includes a lifetime of reading voluminously. And across many genres. I read lots of different types of work simultaneously. It might be a legal history of the landscape alongside Stern’s plant biology, or Gray’s Land Law alongside Anne Carson’s Short Talks, or a philosophy of mathematics alongside exhibition catalogues of Cy Twombly.  And I always go back to the source, be it old editions of vocabularies, dictionaries of Old English, dictionaries of etymologies, or damp prayer books loitering under pews in local churches.  In all of this, there is much percolation and some capillary arisings.  And of all things, I am fascinated by the usefulness of language, how it works, how it does things, and how by making it strange, for example, it can sound the sense of an experience, an encounter with place, and it can perform lexically the linguistic heritage of (for me) this countryside as a unified whole. The connected roots in word choices compositionally perform a similar function to a network of roots underground, and, as the poet Chris McCully put it about A Cranic of Ordinaries, “become an analogue of the land itself’.   

Seeing things, and remembering 

In addition to thinking, experience is required for the cake to rise. Experience is perhaps the baking powder of poetry. My Best Beloveds and I walk the local landscape daily, and I take cues from where they are pointing with their noses, where they are looking, what their body language is doing, how they are encountering the place or space where we are standing together. There is not much in an environment that a labrador misses.  Our encounters with and in place are a deliberate experience. My furry companions have a gift for suddenly stopping and observing.  So we do this together and often time comes to meet us. Be it something in the soil, a war-time button, a fragment of bone, or if I am lucky the whole skull of a crow or a deer, debitage or crag fossils and even the source of a soon-to-be stream bubbling up from the soil.  Often it is the trees.  

When I was at school, until I had my eyes tested, I couldn’t see the board on which the teachers were writing what we had to copy out. So I compensated by remembering what was said instead.  At that time my most favourite book in the whole world was Kipling’s ‘Kim’ and of course I taught myself the Jewel Game – or the observation and memory game which I guess I have played ever since.  Those lifelong habits of minutely observing, of looking and remembering were picked up on by the wonderfully insightful poetry critic, Martyn Crucefix. He is correct in what he says about Emerson’s ‘transparent eyeball.’  And for A Cranic of Ordinaries I was greatly aided also by the inquisitive noses of my finding and retrieving furry companions! 

Why write eco-poetry at all?

I have always lived in East Anglia. And as a late starter in the poetry world, I have seen and experienced a great many changes over decades in the countryside and in rural communities stemming from depressing and frightening changes to the climate.  The main changes are the complete disappearance of abundance and the speed of the change.  Things that I took for granted as a child no longer exist and younger generations are starting from a radically depleted baseline having never known a sky full of swallows, telephone wires sagging with their weight, or a field full of clouds of lekking moths, a hedge full of finches tugging seed from thistle fluff, myriads of sparrow picking up gleanings, deafening dawn choruses, or a car windscreen full of smashed insects.  And on and on the losses go.  Growing up I watched miles and miles of hedgerows being grubbed up, fields fired after harvest with animals shot in sport as they escaped the flames, and fields (it felt like whole villages!) chemically sprayed by little acrobatic agricultural planes (‘agprops’ as they were called) – today these things have stopped which is positive, but the legacy is still there written deep in the ground, in the depleted poisoned soil, in the weakened genomes.  Perhaps writing eco-poetry is a bearing of witness which is simultaneously a plea for change.  It is also about the truth of experience. If I want to know what was growing, flying, living in the hedgerows of parts of East Anglia before the advent of spray chemicals, I look to the poets because they were close to the ground and spoke the truth as they saw it in those fields.  That is not unique to East Anglia.  It has recently been reported that a team of scientists turned to ancient poems to track the population of the Yangtze River’s rapidly declining finless porpoise.   

I take heart from the fact that eco-poetry can effect positive change, or at least draw attention to the need for change by that act of bearing witness to the fact of the devastating consequences of climate change experienced in all our home grounds.  There is a usefulness in poetic language, in telling it ‘slant’ (as Emily Dickinson put it) which enables the conveyance of – in this case – environmental messages experientially and exponentially, perhaps much as the flapping of a butterfly wing here,  is felt a million miles away. 

Eliza’s poems have appeared in Shearsman Magazine, The Rialto,  Tears in the Fence, and Poetry Review. She published The Dropping of Petals (Muscaliet Press, 2021), A Cranic of Ordinaries  (Shearsman, 2024) and Buying the Farm  (Shearsman, 2025). She was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year 2023/24 for her pamphlet The Unpinning of Moths.