Jo Young, a Creative Writing PHD student and former soldier, has won the 2017 Basil Bunting Poetry Prize for her poem ‘Canopoly’. For MyGlasgow News, Sam Pugh caught up with her to find out more.

Jo, who hails from Hampshire, left the UK armed forces in 2014 after serving in numerous places around the world. She says that her time in the army has had a “huge influence” on her creative writing, and that this is no more so evident than in Canopoly.

Speaking of the poem, Jo said: “I wrote ‘Canopoly’ last October, when the French authorities set fire to the so-called refugee “jungle” in Calais”. The poem traverses a dizzying spectrum of violent allusions to the jungle.

A graduate of St Andrews University in 1998, Jo came to be a student at UofG after being stationed In Glasgow through her work in the Army.

Jo isn’t new to being shortlisted for creative writing prizes. She smiles and refers to herself as “the shortlist queen” but admits to very often just falling short of the big prize. Her recent win under the auspices of the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts which hosts the Bunting Poetry Prize.

Asked which creative artists excite her, Jo pointed to Alice Oswald and Mellissa Lee-Haughton, two thrilling poets both currently producing stellar work. 

Jo encourages new, creative writers to engage with the broader community where they’ll find a ‘welcoming and encouraging” environment for all.

Canopoly

by Jo Young

We know all about jungles now. More than we knew in our own black core. Here we are, at the gall bladder of darkness, with eight litres of digestive fluid sluicing daily, effluent and vile. You can’t burn the jungle. Not all of it. Not ever. I once saw a vine grown in a tight spiral, coiling, hidden. A mamba in an airless sump of some forgotten plumbing. And when the concrete plug was chipped off to make way for a new thing, it sprung out seven feet long already, plying for a finger-jam in a bark crack or to lace a spare tongue upon a victim stalk. By now it will be as muscular as an ape’s limb, strong enough to dangle a man, pulsing and rigid. To burn it would have been to burn water. You can’t burn the jungle. The jungle exists everywhere at once, not only the wild. It is bindweed matted in shade between link walls of suburban extensions, it is lichen, it is pollen, it is a dormant seed. You can’t burn the jungle, it is voice. It is breath held in a throat while a fingernail taps a beat waiting for the song to resume. You can’t burn the song. You can’t burn the jungle. Its birds will carry balm and its canopy will smother heat. A long, hidden water-course will drench all efforts and show you what it is to succumb to a liquid plight. Rubber will ooze and things will crawl and suck to you ‘til you plunge to the fossils of razor clams. The saturation of it all is a mesh, a catching net, it can’t be singed nor even briefly set alight. You can’t burn the jungle. You can’t bury this breath.

First published: 24 May 2017

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