(REVIEW) APOCALYPSING, by M. Elizabeth Scott

Maya Uppal enters M. Elizabeth Scott’s APOCALYPSING (blush, 2023) through hazy landscapes, glinting spiral time and the fickle present. 

It’s easy to become convinced by end times these days. Small and big apocalypses the world over, all served to you on a meta platform rabbit hole. Greedy Sucking End Times. Lick their lips. Chew. Spit back out the maddening meta-data stream. 

Q: What is an apocalypse, anyway? 

A: For M Elizabeth Scott, the apocalypse happens in the hot night. 

Blurring vision of the half-closed eye. Don’t look towards the drastic phone screen but rather the blooming nasturtiums. The trick with eyes is to lose all focus and create your own apocalyptic visions. Create the loss of familiar colour, unfocusing one eye then the next. In the merging of shapes as the eyes begin to squirm, all sorts of endings can be imagined. 

Imperfect, unnervingly intimate endings rage through Scott’s 2023 pamphlet, APOCALYPSING. From the nervous energy of lovers' uncertain, as-yet-to-be-described relationships to one another following a fight, to the longing promises of friendship that are projected into the past and the future all at the same time. Heightened by her use of time and place as a pinwheel of references spanning Greek antiquity to the emptied highlands, Scott’s use of setting is gluttonous with no object, person or feeling fixed to one epoch. Here, Medea is summoned into soda-drenched cities pulsing at 200bpm, lovers sit at once between the bedroom and the ocean as the highlands slip into a glistening bronze-age Americana. But what does it mean to spiral into and out of eras, rather than progress neatly, westernly, along? 

Poetry is not an unfamiliar tool for linear dissent. For many indigenous writers and peoples ‘time and place’ are also interwoven experiences. In ideas of spiralic temporality, time is informed by the seasonal cycles of land and present generations' responsibilities to both ancestors and future people who live upon the land. As Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) writes in ‘place against empire’ land and place do not just refer to territory but are used more broadly to refer to all the relations of that place - whether to rocks, rivers, peoples, creatures, plants who all, also, have a worldview. 

In the Spiralic time of Scott’s apocalypse the lyric verses are abundant with the poet’s ‘I’. From ‘I’ and ‘you’ (unnamed) all world-view flows. But this does not prevent Scott’s free associations bestowing independent experiences upon the surrounding cast of flowers, oceans and objects. It is not just Scott experiencing the closing in of sleep in a dark apartment - it is the flowers too who ‘lose their hues / like light in a sieve.’ It is not a human that is courageous ‘but mobs of mushrooms 

bruising blue / like trembling seas of taut iris.’ Maybe this is something poets do? Think of Scott's voice as a true gourmand, eating the world up. 

For Scott, two of the concrete resting points in this spiral of time and place are ‘the old shores’ and the ‘highlands.’ She describes the madness growing on old shores, as if a previous, long-forgotten life in ‘The Silvered Edge:’ 

Meanwhile the nephilim, the necrophiles, the hip Bohemians I left on the old shore are crushing oleanders, tasting of the milk. It seems a supple poison can be sensible when one is left for dead, feeble as memory.

Relationships, like memories, become folded into places. The experience of past-ness, of ‘being on the old shore’ is relative to the poet only because of the poet’s own description of movement. The present is almost the only thing that is real here. But even the present is fickle! In all other time-zones, memory reigns, and memories float away. In poetic language, the present hangs and stories of current actions are passed along, relayed and become past by the time they reach us, expectant readers. 

Contrast this to an earlier poem in the pamphlet, ‘Ages of Man, Phalanxed’ as Scott describes the highlands, projecting them into an alternative present, somewhere on the outer edge of the spiral. A place unreachable to the poet’s body, but existent, somewhere: 

And to gesture to the portal of hereditary maiming, oh I taste it the highlands of a crumpled cloth that made me a CEO of what, the dull ground a sign written in all caps or the thimbleful of paean crowding my mother’s womb Well, I know if I were with you in Inverness my words would sing like nightingales and my ratty hair would cease to stand on end

Scott describes a present full of embodied action. A physical present, imagined and conjured only via the deeply personal, a nearing of ‘you.’ It is as if, all of a sudden, only Scott’s lovers have a body. The highlands themselves are a physical entity, embodied by the poet, empty without.

Throughout APOCALYPSING these hazy landscapes, cities upon the shores, rebirthing highlands, are all part of a life being collected. These glinting moments of places in the process of being forgotten or recalled (each or both or neither) are looming reminiscence of once-familiar voices. These places flit into the relatively dreamy narratives of each poem, but none are as embodied as the projected present. In the present Scott exclaims. Feelings are confessed. Bodies are entwined. This is poetry that enacts a present that could be. Experiences are insular, full of physical destruction, conversations stoppers, fraught, loving, messy relationships. 

In her use of the evolving present, no moment described throughout the pamphlet can truly end. In fact, to spiral, rather than to progress is to undermine the very concept of an ending. And when an ending cannot quite exist, neither can a complete ‘End Times.’ End Times, by their very nature, are ongoing presents. Presents that could-be, or could-not, but always in progress. So, we have to ask again: 

Q: What is an apocalypse?

A: Perhaps, a fundamental changing?

In certain interruptions, jumping up and down on the spiral ~ Scott looks to the future too. One of her most tender poems ‘Dialect Continuum (for Yasmina)’ imagines a future world (the following poem is presented in full.)

Someday, fire will loose the claw of burden, loose the hold of industry. Be there a mountain imbued with night and glass, a certain death of rose. Be there my name again, be there a clamor of soft chains, be there a flat of earthsoil, be there dented music. You and I will measure the communion, our dreams gratuitous as island storms, as cannon-fodder.

Scott’s future is not quite utopian, not presented as a mirage of perfect desire - but - it is music, it is communion, it is the destruction of old systems. It is a complete and overwhelming change within which, still exists the gratuitous ambition of the present. 

The idea of progressing into a fixed future spirals back towards itself eventually. The apocalypse, as experienced in the present and current ‘End Time’ is not really the apocalypse that happened last time, or happened last time, or happened last time, or happened last time or, or, or, or. 

Time is not a thing marching forward towards the next apocalypse. 

Q: What is time? 

A: For the poet, time is irrelevant. 

All written endings are self-directed. It is hard to draw a distinction between where one experience ends and another begins. Much like the experience of falling in love, or experiencing desire, or acting upon lust, they are hard to separate. When M Elizabeth Scott writes about desire, it becomes unbounded by time, place, or eras. Desire outlasts many a small apocalypse.

Scott is unabashed by longing. Desire leaks sticky from each poem. Bleeds through them into the distance between one word and the next - or - one person’s desire into another’s. In many poems, there exists the sense that if the distance between lust and action were closed, a Freudian longing would continue to cry over whichever lovers exist in the poem-world. In ‘You Place Into Me a Myriad of Desires’ Scott writes:

I came to talk about lust from the depths of my being. Say my salt’s fear is a molten thing, a bleak deed done in bed. It prattles on.

Desire and fear move in opposite directions. Circling each other, they perform the same style of tension as anxiety ~ a fearful rendition of the future, enacted by drawing upon the past within the brain’s present noise. 

It might seem hacky of me to talk about apocalypses, end times and sex all at the same time. But what is sexual pleasure, but a little self death? Le Petite Mort. And what is there to do, during any level of apocalypse, but close the gap between longing and action? If we can learn anything from Scott’s writing it is to prevail, post apocalyptically. Scott writes about the moments of living through your apocalypses. As I type, the apocalypse continues again: far away and right next door and I try, where I can, to take action against it. 

You can grab a copy of APOCLYPSING, in Glasgow /UK from Good Press bookshop and internationally from blush.

~

Text: Maya Uppal

Image: blush

Published: 17/06/25