The Colour of Extinction by SC Flynn review – into the darkness… or the light?

Pulsating with tidal energy, the Dublin-based poet’s imaginative first collection is a harrowing wake-up call shot through with optimism

Some therapists ask their clients, “What colour do you associate with that thought?” It is a popular approach for visualising and tackling problems. Flynn innovatively explores this technique with regard to ecology. What image of the future can humans conjure and hold? Are we hurtling towards darkness or instead into the light?

The collection’s initial pessimism is difficult to swallow – the future is a “black cup of loneliness”, half empty, not half full. Ice caps bleed out, stranding penguins on glacial shards. Bees disappear. The apocalypse arrives. This vision fades to grey as plumes of pollution rise, before then blazing red with record temperatures and clouds of blood. The future is a charred kaleidoscope of chaos, recalling the bushfires in the poet’s Australian home town.