Tag Archive for: Karen McCarthy Woolf

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. 

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.”