Tag Archive for: climate

Air Pollution | Kenneth Wark and Cecil Warner

 

There’s something almost apocalyptic in the way Wark and Warner expose the hidden symphony of urban breathlessness in Air Pollution: the authors do more than explain particulate matter—they make you feel the sulfur in your nostrils and the benzene filling your lungs.

The text carries the weight of foreknowledge. Combustion equations are laid out like rites, with every pollutant catalogued, and every measurement quantified. In a world teetering between technological triumph and ecological collapse, Air Pollution is both a cautionary tale meticulously illustrated by data and a requiem for clean air, told with scientific precision and literary restraint.

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.

A Year of Nature Poems | Joseph Coelho

This collection of nature poems makes a perfect gift for the teen with a poetic sensibility. Twelve poems honour the natural world through each of the seasons —beautifully— illustrated, gifting readers a lyrical glance on the Earth’s many treasures.

Read our Librarian’s top climate choices for Young Adults here

 

Startling | Linda France

Linda France’s galvanising tenth collection comprises poems written from, and into, the fabric of the sixth mass extinction. In this uncanny, yet deeply familiar world, beginnings end and endings begin, and we are tasked, as readers, to think beyond the limitations of our perception and enter the throes of deep, geological time ‘where glaciers / once scarred the rock, inscribing their own fall.’  Here, we leap across histories both real and imagined – from the medieval book of hours to a twenty-first century Climate Citizens’ Assembly – and experience the inter-connected nature of emergency.

Rooted in fieldwork and close observation, the collection calls for a rewilding of the self as well as the landscape – a momentous task, that, France demonstrates, can only be achieved through tenderness: whether as an octopus mother dissipating into food for her young, or with the gentle patience of a gardener. Ultimately, and crucially, Startling offers a radical manifesto for kindness, utilising poetry to refresh our individual and collective imaginations, and bring about a necessary shift in cultural consciousness that counteracts the paralysis of alarm – before it’s too late.

As the poet astutely asserts: ‘who of us / is ever ready?’

 

Purchase Startling at Hive online bookshop