Black Fens viral:
Black Fens viral:
My new book, Black Fens Viral, from Shearsman, www.shearsman.com, will be launched at the Swedenborg Hall, in London, at 7.30 on May 13th 2025.
Black Fens Viral began in summer 2020 when I was recovering from Covid, lockdown was lifting, and I travelled to Norfolk on the slow train through the Black Fens of East Anglia. This flat, agricultural landscape of black peat was marshland, before the drainage of the fens. I often write about landscapes I love, such as Exmoor or the north Norfolk coast, which are protected, but I needed to write about this damaged landscape, where plants are exploited and biodiversity ignored. It reflected the damage caused by the pandemic, a result of human incursions into wild places, and it also brought back memories of my childhood in Lincolnshire. ‘Viral’ refers both to the disruption of the pandemic and a predictive text algorithm known as the Markov chain. Its strange rearrangement of text, according to an algorithm, sometimes used for predictive spelling, resembled the viral assault on my mind and body, and on all our lives. The first part of Black Fens Viral was published as a Literary Pocket Book by Steven Hitchins (see February 2021)
‘On the face of it, these rectangular prose-poem paragraphs seem to be ‘one perfect black strip’ after another, not unlike the fens themselves, but on closer inspection they too have been damaged, infected by a language virus. Both moving and funny, and operating as a kind of travel journal through the East Anglian flatlands after Covid, they are also weirdly iterative and glitchy, flickering between memorial and curative to historic ecological and economic harm – ‘the illth in tilth’.
Jeff Hilson
‘I have been watching Black Fens Viral unfold with growing excitement as snippets have been revealed to me via message cards or more elaborate constructs of esoteric intensity. Now the completed work has been realised in this enthralling collection to add to Presley’s already impressive oeuvre.
Deploying the Markov text generator with a lightness of touch, words and sentences fragment, repeat and shudder as if mimicking the shivers and visual disturbances of viral fever enacted on both body and landscape. Intrusive memories of past trauma and grief flit in and out like wounded birds whilst tannoy messages on rural trains warn that COVID 19 is not the only threat we face. This monochromatic world is depicted largely in black and white or greyscale with only rare dashes of colour provided by a glimpse of blue sky, the blue of a dragonfly or the pink blush from an unseen sun’.
Geraldine Monk