Carol Watts – 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 were also intrigued to know how nature and the climate crisis impacted the authors’ process. Here’s Carol Watts on her collection Mimic Pond.  

I’ve written poetry as far back as I can remember. It’s a place I go to, and can live in for an extended time. As a child I can remember tuning in to aural shapes and rhythms to find a way of writing the Northants countryside around me: quarries and gravel pits, shoe factories and agricultural fields stretching down to the Nene River, birds and dockfields. The Lord’s Prayer was one unconscious rhythm I drew on – recited at school every morning. Later I read Wordsworth and Clare for the first time, and at university saw Thomas A Clark and Ted Hughes read their work. I wanted to make pamphlets and poetry like Clark, whose writing has stayed with me. After a long hiatus in my 20s and 30s, I discovered Denise Riley and Lorine Niedecker’s poetry and there was suddenly a kind of late permission in it. In my 40s poems began to pour out in sequences, so intensely that I was often superstitious about stopping, in case I would somehow lose the ability to write.   

Now I’m in my 60s I can feel how a body of work shifts, finds varying speeds and forms as life changes. I have a different kind of physical breath now, which shapes the line. Writing for me has always involved an acute listening and attention to, and is often hooked initially by internal fragments of rhythm and frequencies of sound which I follow, somewhat like a musical score, as well as knots of thought that need unravelling, and dedicated attachments to the sensoria of actual environments and places.  

I’ve always needed to try poems out on the ear – readings are important to me. Sounding out the poems allows me to adjust and edit. There’s a kind of freedom in their sounding different each time they are performed. These days I am more patient, and can trust the process of bringing a collection or project together more as it evolves over time. It’s slower.  The poetry always discovers the forms it needs, and tends to be book or pamphlet length in scope rather than a gathering of individual poems. Not knowing how it will coalesce is part of the work and discovery. I have often made work collaboratively with others – a composer, sound artist, a choreographer, other poets – which can challenge that sense of encounter in transformative and unexpected ways. But that foundational listening is also a solitary and deeply valued thing. 

Mimic Pond came together over three years, and was grounded in regular walks around an urban seasonal pond on London’s Blackheath. The walks fed into a fat notebook and sometimes diary of records, reading, photographs, drawings and observations which is ongoing. I keep notebooks when writing, but not usually on this scale. The pandemic had silenced urban traffic, particularly the noise of flight paths, and a small pond I had been passing straight by for over twenty years hoved into view. There were constraints: I had to walk the same looping parabolic route each day, and had to see what might manifest there, or no. I thought of it in a way like a melting glacier giving up its once frozen objects – these might be words, or weathers, or rhythms of plants and birds, bones, shards of history – since it is a symbolic spot famous for protests and gatherings – and material fragments from other poets. Visiting the pond over time, and recording the way it dries up and returns, has given way to a deeper immersion in that neighbourhood, one among all the human and other-than-human lives bound into a loose and fragile community there. The poems are testimony to that binding. I’ve got in mind Leslie Scalapino’s words: ‘a burst of a place that is complete attention’. 

One of the shocking dimensions of the ecocidal nature of climate catastrophe is the sheer speed of change and depletion that it has been possible to experience within individual lifetimes, or even just a few years. As I’m writing this, the news is reporting that we have just experienced the hottest summer ever. I worked on Mimic Pond in 2022 when temperatures exceeded 40 degrees in the UK for the first time. It has been yet another summer of floods and fires across the planet. Poetry to me has an important place in holding this crisis to forms of specific witness, exploring the deeply felt attachments we have to environments and their inhabitants. Finding new languages for care and recognition, to pass along. At the same time poetries have global stakes in creating new ecological imaginaries – that draw on deep time and scale differently, or manifest alternative futures –  finding ethical affinities with multispecies subjectivities at a time of extreme planetary violence and extraction. It remains hopeful nonetheless to feel the explosion of work now which expands beyond what used to be called ‘nature writing’ – from active kinds of everyday listening to urgent activism – to be part of that community. 

Carol Watts is a poet who lives in south-east London. Her twelve collections and chapbooks include Mimic Pond, Kelptown and When Blue Light Falls (Shearsman), Occasionals and Wrack (Reality Street), Fifty-Six with George Szirtes (Arc), Sundog (Veer), and Dockfield (Equipage). She is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Sussex.