With this eye, Berry contemplates ‘how memories curl and twist around details and moments, observing how they connect up and constellate.’ She sees how animals – animate, inanimate, textual and symbolic – have shaped her life, from the teddy bears of her childhood, to the ‘shadowy and nocturnal’ creatures, like bats and ravens, that drew her as a teenager, to the animals that, like the adult Berry, ‘have the city as a home’. Berry uses the simile of an insect’s compound eye to explain how ‘the eye that sees through time observes how the past braids into the present and how it shapes what is to come’, for it ‘perceives all directions at once’. ![]() The essay ‘Compound Eye’ opens the volume, speaking to the ways that animals and insects encourage us to observe the world from different vantage points. Berry’s collection of essays likewise compels its readers to attend to the presence of our nonhuman companions. And while a virus is not an animal, insect, or gastropod, it has forced us to pay attention to the fact that the nonhuman world has intentions of its own. While a slow-moving gastropod differs from a rapidly replicating virus, I could not help but think of the gaps the virus has created, not just through death, but in supply chains, leadership, our patience. One handwritten co-contribution reads Sylvia, know that your words live on, even though you are gone, with the words ‘even though’ interrupted by ‘a string of irregular, squarish holes with curled edges, the work of snails’. ![]() ![]() The notes, left on Plath’s grave by admirers, had been eaten by snails. One of the images from her collection that stayed with me was the latticework of letters on Sylvia Plath’s grave, which Berry visited in Yorkshire. When I first sat down with Vanessa Berry’s collection of essays, Gentle and Fierce, we were in the midst of another destabilising Covid wave.
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