The city of York, a stately place of fortified walls and towers, and Roman remains instead of basements below Georgian terraced houses, nonetheless is familiar to those who live, work, or regularly visit, as a city of water. It is prone to flooding. With the increase in named storms hitting the UK, it is living its territorial precarity ever more closely. The University of York campus features bodies of water and is rich in waterfowl. One saintly runner duck and erstwhile social media star, Longboi, whose friendly towering guarded our wellbeing during the pandemic, has been commemorated by his own statue, and deserves an ode someday.

The writing of water in Old and Middle English texts is awesome and precise. As Carolyn Twomey and Daniel Anlezark note in Meanings of Water in Early Medieval England (2021), ‘Water is fundamentally threatening to human beings even beyond the perils of too much and too little of it: metaphysically, water suggests a loss of self.’ Yet water can be salvific, life-giving; it can reflect the fluency of wisdom, and image the powerful, unknowable divine. It is no surprise, then, that Water Poetics is one of the most exciting research strands at York, led by Dr Rebecca Drake, a medievalist by training and a poet in fact.

With the confluence of thought allowed by the circulation of people and texts, it was no surprise to me to find that Becca Drake’s work, though originating elsewhere, aligns with Kamau Brathwaite’s vision of tidalectics. For Brathwaite, the physical environment, its spiritual heritage, the ...