Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority edited by Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf

 

Revitalising conversations around environmentalism and ecopoetics, this new gathering of African, Asian and Caribbean diaspora voices is both urgent and inspirational.

There has been a welcome surge of nature writing in recent years. Yet this has raised questions as to whose voices are privileged and heard in a space predominantly occupied by Western European traditions and authors. In Nature Matters, poets Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf seek to redress this imbalance. 

Their genre-enriching anthology presents brand-new commissions alongside formative works from the past fifty years that invite us to reconsider nature poetry from global-majority perspectives. Image-rich and formally diverse, the poems explore fundamental and ecological themes including climate crisis and the Anthropocene; urban nature, solitude and alienation; protest and radical empathy; Indigenous wisdom and alternative histories. 

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What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures | Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

 

Sometimes the bravest thing we can do while facing an existential crisis is imagine life on the other side. This provocative and joyous book maps an inspiring landscape of possible climate futures.

Through clear-eyed essays and vibrant conversations, infused with data, poetry, and art, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson guides us through solutions and possibilities at the nexus of science, policy, culture, and justice. Visionary farmers and financiers, architects and advocates, help us conjure a flourishing future, one worth the effort it will take—from every one of us, with whatever we have to offer—to create.

If you haven’t yet been able to picture a transformed and replenished world—or to see yourself, your loved ones, and your community in it—this book is for you. If you haven’t yet found your role in shaping this new world or you’re not sure how we can actually get there, this book is for you.

With grace, humor, and humanity, Johnson invites readers to ask and answer this ultimate question together: What if we get it right?

Seasonal Disturbances | Karen McCarthy Woolf

 

The poems in Seasonal Disturbances explore nature, the city, and the sacred presenting poems that aim to inspire, in the words of the author, an “activism of the heart, where we connect to and express forces of renewal and love”. Described as “lyrical and inventive”, McCarthy Woolf’s poems in this collection use classic and contemporary forms, the landay, a sonnet sequence and golden shovels with a disrupted zuihitsu offering a Conversation with Water threaded through the book.

Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf is a fellow of The Complete Works — a professional development programme committed to creating more cultural diversity in poetry publishing. She has published three full collections of poetry. Her latest Top Doll (2024) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize. Her first collection An Aviary of Small Birds (2014) commemorates a baby son who died in childbirth while Seasonal Disturbances, (2017) is set against a backdrop of ecological and emotional turbulence.

Her use of form is playful and inventive yet at the same time deliberate and acts as a vehicle to reflect the strangeness of this time where humanity face an existential threat yet life goes on with its love, loss and arguments despite the climate emergency. An unstable and perilous time in which, “ducklings slip in mud” and teenage asylum seekers in Sangatte “disappear in a flash,” and “An estate agent window shatters/ any hope of securing cheap accommodation.”

Dog Days Done features in With Love, Grief and Fury | Salena Godden

 

Salena Godden is a poet, author, activist, broadcaster, memoirist and essayist. Born in the UK, Salena Godden is of Jamaican-Irish heritage and based in London. Her published books include the poetry volumes Under The Pier (Nasty Little Press), Fishing in the Aftermath: Poems 1994-2014 (Burning Eye) and Pessimism Is For Lightweights – 13 pieces of Courage and Resistance, Rough Trade Books, 2018.

She writes: “We live in tumultuous times, most of it terrifying, and I feel the writing of this, the narration of events, the documenting of these times is vital and an important part of my job.” Salena performs widely and appeared at this year’s Green Gathering.

Bioluminescent Baby | Fiona Benson

 

The poems in Fiona Benson’s Bioluminescent Baby reveal the short yet urgent lives of insects. Originally commissioned by University of Exeter’s ‘Project Urgency’ as a commentary on the looming biodiversity disaster, and reprinted in her collection Ephemeron in a section entitled Insect Love Songs.

In this haunting poem from Bioluminescent Baby about the glow worm Benson lures us into the life of the insect, not by anthropomorphising it but by siting their behaviour besides ours; in petrol stations, the city’s neon lights, where “the dark is drowned. ” Hinting at the precarity of reproduction as glow-worms and fireflies are uniquely susceptible to light pollution. Suggesting a parallel to how we once “wandered in the lanes,” seeking brief and perhaps illicit encounters.

“Benson is interested in what insects tell us about life itself – and instinct. The opening poem, Love Poem, Lampyridae Lampyris noctiluca, is about a firefly that uses bioluminescence to attract its mate. It is a poem of drive and precision.” Kate Kellaway, The Observer. Fiona Benson has published two previous collections, both shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize: Bright Travellers (Cape, 2014) Vertigo and Ghost (Cape, 2019)

BEYOND THE BRINK IS THE BEGINNING | RICHARD WAIN

 

“Wain’s poetry collection is full of sharply-crafted insights into the world we have, and the ways we might open our doors to something different that we’d be proud to leave to the generations that come after us – which is the living definition of Thrutopian writing.

We build the worlds we want to see, and we imagine them into being. And then there are ley lines stretching out across the terrain of the collective unconscious and others can walk them, and others and others. Until the day they feel like the way everyone has always walked.” – Manda Scott

Rebel Talk | Extinction Rebellion

Responding to a call from poet Rip Bulkeley’s call, sixty-three poets contributed to the anthology Rebel Talk. As Philip Gross’s Foreword explains, the poems “…seek to show what, uniquely, these times are, and why it is once again so urgent that creative artists respond to the challenges they pose, in particular to the climate emergency.

Each poem is an individual response to this challenge: as a collection, they possess a wealth of language and imagery, by turns hard, laconic, diamond sharp, down-to-earth, tender, urgently lyrical. What are these times? Almost – not quite – too late.”

Rebel Talk is divided into six chapters, exploring themes and emotions which draw together responses to the climate emergency. The opening chapter, ‘Earth’, rejoices and grounds itself in nature’s diversity and cosmic unity. Here is a vision of a natural world which we can recognise and respect, in which we can flourish and thrive because we know what we must do to make sure we don’t damage it.

Neptune’s Projects | Rishi Dastidar

What do you do when you are a god – but powerless and unable to prevent one of your favourite species from their insatiable, accelerating death wish? Do you try to shout louder and more insistently, or instead reinvent yourself as a troubadour of romantic ruin? Such are the dilemmas posed by Rishi Dastidar in his third poetry collection Neptune’s Projects, a reshaping of mythology for the climate crisis era which gives bold consideration to the stark choices we face. A post-apocalyptic jig and reel, these poems are compelling, deadpan yarns of the sea, full of both fury and fun. In Neptune’s Projects the end of humanity is made wry, thrilling – and alive.

‘Rishi Dastidar is a ludic myth-maker, a satirist of keen eye and big heart. These poems of the sea and shores of this ‘tight little island’ bite back with verve and gallows wit.’ ~ Karen McCarthy Woolf

‘There has always been an intersection between poetry and the natural world. Now here comes Rishi Dastidar’s Neptune to add wit, postmodern panache and mythic irony to the tradition of the open sea. A richly rewarding read.’ ~ Roger Robinson 

Rishi Dastidar was guest contributor to May 2023’s What We’re Reading Now. Discover some of his recommended eco-writing here.

What Fire | Alice Miller

‘What Fire is about how to continue as catastrophe crawls in, when the climate crisis has its grip on us all, the internet has been shut down, and the buildings are burning up. What happens when the philosophers never arrive? What songs are still worth singing? In her third collection, Alice Miller takes a fierce, unflinching look at the world we live in, at what we have made, and whether it is possible to change.
Alice Miller takes a critical lens to our current malaise, tackling the current decline of our climate and planet to the way technology has both advanced and stunted human civilisations. A collection which feels as if it’s somehow speaking to us all.’ ~ Anthony Anaxagorou

‘In Alice Miller’s What Fire, the legacies of our past and future are ardently exhumed and examined. Miller’s musical, philosophical lines wrangle themes of grief, guilt, climate change, cancer, love, love lost, and war with resonance and insight. By hewing to reality and refusing retreat, Miller’s lyrical conscience emerges as the vehicle for a hard-won hope’ ~ Mark Leidner

Source: poet’s website

Garden Physic | Sylvia Legris

Garden Physic is a radical poetic movement through plant life. With her singular line, Sylvia Legris journeys readers through an investigation of how we articulate our ecological surrounds in language through botanical histories.

With a structure that emulates the style of classic manuscripts, Legris’s book deploys humour, deep intellect, and a fanatical obsession with the potential of language, punching through the cliches of contemporary nature writing. A brief snapshot:

‘how to write about flowers without the nauseating sentimental phraseology?
No quaint, no dainty, no winsome. This smells good, that smells bad, my hands
rank with manure. This at least is pure.’

The whole book is a glorious meditation on the garden and the power of plants: how they can heal us, emotionally and physically, and how we communicate with them.