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Black Fens Viral began in summer 2020 when I was recovering from Covid. Lockdown was lifting and I was able to travel to Norfolk on the slow train which goes through the Black Fens of East Anglia. This flat, almost hedgeless and treeless, agricultural landscape of black peat was once marshland, before the drainage of the fens. The first sluice was created by the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden in 1642 to limit the tidal flow up the Great Ouse, but he did not realise that the peat would shrink after it dried out and be blown away by the wind. We now know that it also adds to global warming through leaking carbon dioxide and means the risk of flooding is more acute than ever.
I often write about landscapes I love, such as Exmoor or the north Norfolk coast, protected by national parks and nature reserves, but I needed to write about this damaged landscape, where plants are exploited and biodiversity ignored. It corresponded to the damage caused by the pandemic, a result of human incursions into wild places. Writing about the Black Fens also brought back memories of my childhood in Lincolnshire. Depopulated by mechanised agriculture, it was a lonely landscape, as well as an ecological disaster. (Frances Presley)
"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 grayscale 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
