Tag Archive for: hope

Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power | Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit - Hope int he Dark
At a time when political, environmental and social gloom can seem overpowering, this remarkable book offers a lucid, affirmative and well-argued case for hope. This exquisite work traces a history of activism and social change over the past five decades – from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the worldwide marches against the war in Iraq.

Hope in the Dark is a paean to optimism in the uncertainty of the 21st century. Tracing the footsteps of the last century’s thinkers – including Woolf, Gandhi, Borges, Benjamin and Havel – Solnit conjures a timeless vision of cause and effect that will light our way through the dark and lead us to profound and effective political engagement.

Active Hope | Joanna Macy

“Active hope is not wishful thinking….Active hope is waking up the beauty of life on whose behalf we can act.” The eco-philosopher Joanna Macy’s ground-breaking work explores how humankind can face the challenges of a turbulent age through the cultivation of interconnectedness and positive change. At the heart of reaching a more compassionate, spiritual, and sustainable world is the enactment of “The Great Turning”: a civilizational shift from industrial growth to ecological and social wellbeing.

Read more of our Climate Classics: timeless works exploring themes of climate change and biodiversity loss.

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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

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Hope: Visions for a Better Future | Create the Future

 

Too often, we focus on the kind of future we fear. It’s time to start creating the one we long for.

Creating the future means finding the courage to re-imagine life on this beautiful planet, and having the determination to make it happen. It means seeking out hope in times of darkness, and seeing community in the midst of distrust. Most of all, it means flipping the script: it’s time to turn our anxieties about the climate crisis into action and justice. It’s time to be the change we want to see.

Hope: Visions Of A Better Future is a collection of stories, artwork and interviews from experts, thinkers, campaigners and writers, Hope is part-guide and part-inspiration that invites us to celebrate the solutions and actions that are already in progress, and feel the power which lies within all of us to be a force for good through our contributions to a better, more sustainable world.

This tremendous anthology from the inspirational Create the Future team includes six creative writing pieces, five ‘postcards from the future’ created by schoolchildren throughout the UK, and fifteen interviews with some fascinating experts on a wide range of climate topics. There is a lovely

Read Hope: Visions for the Future online and free thanks to Create the Future.

Tongues of Fire | Seán Hewitt

In this collection, Seán Hewitt gives us poems of a rare musicality and grace. By turns searing and meditative, these are lyrics concerned with the matter of the world, its physicality, but also attuned to the proximity of each moment, each thing, to the spiritual.

Here, there is sex, grief, and loss, but also a committed dedication to life, hope and renewal. Drawing on the religious, the sacred and the profane, this is a collection in which men meet in the woods, where matter is corrupted and remade. There are prayers, hymns, vespers, incantations, and longer poems which attempt to propel themselves towards the transcendent. In this book, there is always the sense of fragility allied with strength, a violence harnessed and unleashed. The collection ends with a series of elegies for the poet’s father: in the face of despair, we are met with a fierce brightness, and a reclamation of the spiritual. ‘This is when / we make God, and speak in his voice.’

Paying close attention to altered states and the consolations and strangeness of the natural world, this is the first book from a major poet.

 

Read more of our poetry recommendations here.