Fish Factory

Riley Faulds is an environmental scientist in the streets, and a poet in the sheets. Originally from Whadjuk, Bindjareb and Wadandi Noongar Country on the west coast of Australia, he’s currently studying his doctorate in World Literatures at the University of Oxford. His thesis focuses on how the contrasting systems of colonial expansion in Australia, southern Africa and the Caribbean have influenced literatures of agriculture and gardening in those zones.

His poems and reviews have been published in various of Australia’s best journals and magazines, including Westerly, Rabbit, Cordite, Plumwood Mountain and the Australian Poetry Anthology, though he saves his best work for birthday cards. In the past year, he was Highly Commended in the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize and won the Jon Stallworthy Poetry Prize. Before moving to sunny England for his Masters and DPhil, Riley worked as an enviro scientist and studied Agricultural Science and English & Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia, with Honours in Creative Writing. He’s obsessed with weeds.

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And weeds are what I started my Fish Factory Residency with in August. I first came across the Residency a few years ago in some newsletter or other, and dreamed of flying up one day to the country that’s been at the top of my list to visit for a long time. Arriving to study in England meant the only barrier left was the North Sea, and ford that I did (with the help of Icelandair), after long months of writing a Masters dissertation on weeds in Australian poetry.

The cloud was low and the fog thick when I first touched down in Egilsstaðir enroute Stöðvarfjörður, but I quickly found some fellow Factory-bound artists and knew I was in for a beautiful time. We were greeted by the amazing Kris, Vinny, Tumi and Miso, and by the spectacular views of the fjord and mountains from the Factory. My first poem was about the vibrant flowers of the Nootka Lupin (a proscribed invasive weed) in the carpark of the Factory, and from there I bounced between full days of furious writing, and periods where words wouldn’t come. Those days were for exploring, chatting with my fellow-travellers and chuckin’ a stick for Tumi, and hiking and camping in the mountains, where I saw some beautiful and some spooky things.

I ended up writing a lot over the course of the month, though I could definitely have written more. I waxed lyrical about the fjord and beyond, about the home I miss so much, and worked on a verse novella of sorts, a murder mystery outside the bounds of what I usually write. I started a blog (hilarious, classic), compiled a manuscript of poems, found clarity here and there, and revelled in the Friday night group dinners with my lovely co-Residents, the trip to the next fjord for a punk and metal gig, and spotted whales, seals and birds of all kinds. I even did some visual art myself (far outside my usual wheelhouse!), making a collage-covered book of poems I’d written during the month, illustrated by the amazing Olwyn. The final exhibition/concert I put it together for was world-class.

The dynamic, unfamiliar ecologies, amazing collaborative space and group, and support from Kris and Vinny have propelled me into a new stage of writing and getting my words out there. I spent an amazing month here, and got to drive and camp around the island afterwards—what an incredible place! But I’ve got a few more Stöðvarfjörður poems knocking around my brain, so I have some unfinished business in the fjord. Plus, I need to see those lupins flower again, and witness how much more real estate they manage to claim, so I’ll definitely be back—that’s a threat…

Stöðvarfjörður Suite

1. what a boat becomes

there is a place at the mouth of the fjord

on which the ocean’s rush breaks open

twice, three times, as i watch what should be

open water. a reef there, i guess, at what

i thought was a boat, at first, tracing

subsurface waves below the wash of

the audible. but i watch the place, two

three times soon after, and no rockswirled white

is shown. a boat that was a reef must

in fact be a whale, spuming launching

and quieting away to some other open place.

2. water fall

surely a day’s flow down green mountain

would be enough to drain that one steepness.

ankle-deep moss and rock is all there is

upon that face—no glacier/snowmelt.

time and sun must surely put all streams

to rest. but step rather than see, and

you’ll know that moss has its infinite pores

that the sound of water in marble halls

is everywhere underfoot up there, that

only constant racing or glacial-paced cold

could make a place like this

3. construction site

as if the siltsmudge below the diggers quarrying sea wall,

spreading shadowbrown along the villageside edge

mocks blue, and replaces the glaciers that formed it

with a far sharper sound than a proper deep creaking.

4. the birds

last night, frank watched The Birds, and hitchcock

spoke, in a way, through tiny signs in the house

this morning. fingernailsize droppings, a tear

in a leather arm, and no bird found bodily. except

the brittle raven, stood ceramic above

the half-locked cabinet, the window cracked.

at night, seabirds gather in the pools of light cast

by the dock’s many floods, dipping necks into places

only they, and magnetic fish forced to that glow

can see. they aren’t the same daybirds that fan together,

arrayed against fjord’s inward swell-lines

making slow way towards the mouth

ripples streaming aside as if they were still rocks

in a rapid. ducks, or some other dark bird, tracing

with their communal body where currents strike tides

meet waves—where fjord must catch and eddy

in the clouded day darker than deep flood light.

5. nootka lupin

one of only three proscribed invasives on this whole invaded land

purple flowers resist their turn to greyed seedpods, scattered profuse

all around this factory, this centre of a brief bevelled life. so many species

are beyond the native, in the two kinds of here that are this island

and this carpark. and yet, this only weed loops nitrogen in the cracks

between oily carwrecks rusting into the fjord, around trucks speeding nightly

through sleeping village above ninth-century longhouse, far below

fogged lakes clearing sudden to the half-rot tortured corpse

of a reindeer strapped to imported wood. no weeds in sight, except

for every non-mossy species. no weeds in sight, but

the one we should all agree on.