Borrowed Ground is JLM Morton's second full collection, a reckoning with land, climate grief, and the entanglement of human and more-than-human life. Rooted in the woodland and river country of the west of England, the poems move between close observation and myth: a central creation sequence follows a black pine through litany and shaped, fragmenting text, while a closing sequence stages the drowning and mythic rebirth of Sabrina, goddess of the Severn. Morton works through erasure, found material, and liturgical forms without losing lyric precision, holding ecological dread against humour, domestic comfort, and ancient, feminist modes of knowing.
 
PRAISE for Borrowed Ground:
Borrowed Ground is a generous meditation on land, connection, and recovery that explores the borrowedness of our lives and works to bring neglected voices forward. These poems are formally inventive and lyrically captivating; they dissolve into the memory of weather and emerge into the knowledge of the black pine.
   — Alycia Pirmohamed
 
Deeply accomplished, J. L .M. Morton’s poems are tuned to the rough rhythms of seasons and the insistent music of sorrows. In her work, time is seamless, history vivid and brutal. Yet Morton’s words are also warmed by humour, and by human tenderness. Her powerful final lines give an extraordinary sense both of the planet and of its smallest places. There is soup. There is hope.
   — Alison Brackenbury
 
The heart of this collection from celebrant JLM Morton is a forest and a blessing: ‘Blessed be the first layer of rot’ that connects us to the nervous systems of Life in fuzing, synaptic phrasing. Flooded with hollows, this poetry affirms complicated (and implicated) relationships: fire that would ‘eat us alive in the car’, waxwings that howl, a civilisation that’s ‘Going out./ All guns blazing.’ Morton’s eye for detail consistently brings all the big climate questions close and reflects sharply on our longing, anger and grief. 
Not unlike the elf caps of ‘Late Warning’, Morton’s poems are ‘acoustic mirrors’ broadcasting ancient, feminist knowing into the jangling contemporary hubbub. Morton is an unflinching chronicler of what is. You could not want for a more entangled, fecund, thrilling exhalation of Life dying.
   — Alice Willitts
 
Ambitious, intelligent, sensuous, and deeply attentive to land, myth, grief, and non-human life. There is real authority here.
   — Vasiliki Albedo
 
JLM Morton’s words / Borrowed Ground holds the reader in the palm of their own hand, tracing veins back to the ancient and on to the future in a mesh tight with wit, humility and magic.
   — Mara Simpson
 
ABOUT JLM Morton:
JLM Morton is a writer, celebrant and creative producer based in the west of England. Her poetry has featured on BBC6 Music and is widely published, including in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Rialto, Magma, Mslexia, and The London Magazine. Winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer, Laurie Lee and Poetry Archive Worldview Prizes, her debut poetry collection was Red Handed (Broken Sleep Books, 2024), highly commended by the Forward Prizes and a Poetry Society book of the year. Her first nonfiction book is forthcoming in Spring 2027.