Is your retirement plan dying in the climate wars? Are you getting on with things in the meantime? In Life expectancy begins to fall, Tom Sastry asks how we normalise an apocalypse, taking us on a tour of bad coping strategies, unwelcome epiphanies, and striking reminders of what we still have.
Part-elegy and part-satire, these poems do not show you what to do in a crisis, nor do they promote the cliches of positive thinking that tell you how to be a good worker, an effective activist or a spiritual person. Instead, quietly and persuasively, Sastry develops a subtle meditation on hope. The poetry shows us as we mostly are, lost in the enormity of it all and busy with other things. Explore a world where ‘pessimism is complicated by love’ and optimism is found hiding in moments where ‘nothing happens, in the most lavish way’.
About the Author :
Tom Sastry is political, ironic, emotional, morbid and funny in all the wrong places. He has published two previous collections (both with Nine Arches) and one pamphlet. These have been (variously) Poetry School Book of the Year, Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice, highly commended in the Forward Prize and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize.
Review :
‘In Life expectancy begins to fall, Tom Sastry turns his great gifts - wit, originality, formal innovation - to the big subjects of our time. A video of an explosion plays backwards, while the real world spirals towards destruction. A schoolboy responds to finding out about the Big Bang by developing an interest in blowing things up. A poem about the purchase of a woodland burial plot moves towards a laugh-out-loud conclusion. In their mordant humour, their sideways angle on the world and the joyous precision of their language choices, the poems recall writers like Charles Simic, though Sastry's world is all his own. While the poet announces in 'Retail Politics,' that 'We can't solve the world,' one can't help but think that, if we all lived with the tenderness and good sense of this poet, we might have a better chance. It takes a special writer to have us laughing while never taking his subjects anything but seriously, or to move so fluently between humour and beautiful moments of emotive power. This may be the most important - and certainly the most entertaining - book about subjects like the end of the world I've yet found.’
“Startling, sardonic, and absolutely necessary, Life expectancy begins to fall navigates the territory between climate collapse and daily life with unflinching honesty and tenderness. ‘Good people are doing nothing again’ declares Sastry, laying bare the comfortable paralysis of our age. These poems resist both easy despair and false comfort, instead finding a new language for living with the weight of what’s happened, and all that is happening. ‘If you woke from this dream, you would want to go back’ he writes in ‘Navigating the Peri-Apocalypse with Radical Self-Care’, revealing how we’ve made ourselves at home in a catastrophe. This is eco-poetry that transcends elegy, offering instead a clear-eyed examination of how to maintain our humanity under the shadow of collapse. In this collection, Tom Sastry teaches us how to notice, and even love, what remains as it vanishes.”
‘I admire Tom Sastry’s poems for their clarity, complexity, and kindness. Here, they ask how to live well in this ‘Peri-Apocalypse’ – ‘halfway up the Anthropocene’ – while preparing for accelerating, calamitous futures, where ‘trouble grows from trouble’. Refusing the treadmill of ‘emotional correctness’ they riff wildly on AI poets, inverse A-Bombs and defrosting billionaires, but also our intimate moments where, ‘nothing happens, in the most lavish way’. On a very troubled planet, these poems celebrate the solace of pints with conspiracy theorists and taking part with all your foibles. Or quitting, which is OK too.’
