Released 1 December 2025 // Poetry Pamphlet // 56 pages
Content warning: image of deceased gannet caught in a net inside book.
‘From its arresting opening line, “Add a splash of homicide to water”, this collaboration by Stephen Paul Wren and Lesley Curwen is a series of striking reflections on plastic, and how it has shifted from wonder substance to menace. The poems are gripping, unapologetically direct in showing us our dependence on the material, and the damage to the oceans and the wider world this has wrought. The language throughout is alien and scary, naggingly insistent on confronting us with what is happening. Will we listen to these meditations, warnings, laments? I hope so.’
— Rishi Dastidar: poet, consulting editor at The Rialto and chair of Wasafiri
‘It’s far from straightforward to compile a collection of compelling poems centred on the oceanic pollution of microplastics, dealing with the implications for marine life and the human food chain. These poems strive to do just that: they are insistent, serious, uncompromising; bold, too, in embracing modernist tendencies and deploying technical scientific terms one normally wouldn’t find in poetry. This is about as far as you can get from light reading; but the chimaera-driven microscopic perspectives and the unsentimental spareness of the language make it tenaciously memorable. Permanence manages to contribute arrestingly to the evolving aesthetics of Ecopoetry whilst also serving to educate and inform its readers on a crucial issue.’
— Mario Petrucci: award-winning poet, physicist, ecologist; early founder of Ecopoetry in UK
‘What emerges from these poems, from their ingenious merging of technical and descriptive language, is a strange hybrid lyric that places our obsessive use of plastic within a larger temporal, or anthropological, sweep that is as poignant as it is hard-hitting.
Throughout these poems there is a lightness of touch, a deft imagining of future dread scenarios, where there might be placed a small bead of hope somewhere in the overwhelming detritus.
With their mix of ordinary and outlandish imagery these poems offer insights into our endemic use of a substance whose everydayness and traditional reputation, as harmless, colourful, durable, is exposed as something far more sinister and alarming.
Below the acceptable, conventional use of plastic these poems reveal a deeper, more real – often surreal – exploration of the inherent dangers and damage it causes.
It’s fascinating to see poems that reveal what lies beneath the acceptable surface of what we use so unthinkingly, on a daily basis, the damage we often so unconsciously cause.’
— Greta Stoddart: award-winning poet, editor, and teacher for the Poetry School
