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. 

Available to purchase from Broken Sleep Books, Poetry Book Society and all good bookstores.

PRAISE for Borrowed Ground

Borrowed Ground by JLM Morton is a lyric ecology of dread, devotion, and damaged inheritance, written from woods, lanes, riverbanks, and suburban edges where the nonhuman world keeps pressing its claims. These poems move between tight, image-led lyrics and more expansive prose blocks, braiding birds, seeds, fungi, and weather with biblical echo, mythic return, and the daily abrasions of modern life, from fly-tipping and job centres to wildfire tourism and floodwater. A long sequence addressed to Black Pine becomes both prayer and argument, as Morton tests the language of blessing against collapse, grief, and the uneasy ethics of belonging. Throughout, the collection holds beauty and brutality in the same frame, insisting that attention is not innocence, but a form of witness.

— Poetry Book Society

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