Tag Archive for: poetry

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

 

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The European Eel | Steve Ely

‘These eels were born in a continent of ocean
​and their parents carried into that vastness
​on mindless, reliable, pot-luck currents
​from Iceland, Belgium, Tunisia, Spain.’

​The European Eel is a long poem that imagines the life cycle, ecological contexts and ​enigma of the charismatic and critically endangered fish of the poem’s title. Based on Ely’s in-depth engagement with the scientific literature, discussions with leading eel researchers and conservationists, and hands-on experience with the eel in river systems across the country and abroad, ​The European Eel is unique not only in its sustained birth-to-death focus on the eel, but in the vivid way the eel’s riverine and marine habitats are evoked and articulated—and in its portrayal of the daunting array of anthropogenic threats that are currently threatening this once common species with extinction. Although a poem first and foremost—an Expressionistic epic monology that transforms its natural history into a quasi-gnostic affirmation of the persistence of life in the context of the Anthropocene and the Sixth Extinction—the poem’s rootedness in research enables it to transcend its status as art to function as a credible piece of informed nature writing capable of shaping ecological debate. Seventeen pages of illustrations by the award-winning artist P.R. Ruby complement and interpret the text, and detailed notes provide context that further opens up the astonishing world of the European eel.

‘Steve’s research of the eel’s complex life history is reflected in this incredible long-form poem – anything shorter would not have done this fish justice.’  ~ Dr Matthew Gollock, Marine and Freshwater Senior Programme Manager, Zoological Society of London.

Source: London Review of Books

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Much With Body | Polly Atkin

Much With Body is the startlingly original second collection by poet Polly Atkin. The beauty of the Lake District is both balm and mirror, refracting pain and also soothing it with distraction: unusual descriptions of frogs, birds, a great stag that ‘you will not see’. Much of the landscape is lakescape, giving the book a watery feel, the author’s wild swimming being just one kind of immersion. There is also a distinct link with the past in a central section of found poems taken from transcripts of the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, from a period late in her life when she was often ill. In common with the works of the Wordsworths, these poems share a quality of the metaphysical sublime. Their reverence for the natural world is an uneasy awe, contingent upon knowledge of our fragility and mortality.

Rite of Passage | Dom Bury

Dom Bury’s Rite of Passage is an initiation into what it means to be alive on the planet in the midst of extinction, of climate, environmental and systematic collapse. It is a journey into the shadow of man’s distorted relationship with the earth. And yet in the utter darkness of this hour, these often provocative poems suggest that there is hope. That we have had to come to the edge of our own annihilation as a species to collectively shift how we live, that only in the dark glare of this crisis, can a new world from the ashes of the old one now be formed.

Inmates | Sean Borodale

The poems of Inmates stage encounters with insects at sites and moments of their refuge, torpor, hatching or fighting, of traversing a floor in the night or climbing a wall, of their death and decay – all in and around the house of the writer, with whom they are sharing time, as fellow inmates.

There is an urgency to these poems, emerging from the instant of their writing, and the close attention Borodale brings to his observation of the natural world results in poems of real intensity. Inmates is an attempt to co-exist with the natural world – examining it, intimately, at the edge of language itself, where the human voice begins to break apart.

How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) | Barbara Kingsolver

This edition gathers together Barbara Kingsolver’s vibrant and various poems, revealing an intimate side to her creative practice as yet unseen. Almost resembling a Collected or Selected Poems, the book is divided into thematically linked sections: a series of ‘How to’ poems that smartly balance tongue-in-cheek guides with revelatory wisdom; a complicated family pilgrimage to Italy; cherished childhood memories; the perils and pleasures of being a [female] writer; elegies to lost loved ones; and elegies to the planet. Sharing the natural fluidity and compassionate humanity of her prose, How to Fly will both delight Kingsolver’s devoted readership and welcome a host of new readers to her luminous poetry.

The Threadbare Coat | Thomas A Clark

This Selected Poems celebrates Scotland’s most distinctive contemporary writer – a vivid minimalist, ruralist and experimentalist.

“The Threadbare Coat is a beautiful production, and an interesting selection” ~ Rupert Loydell

Stride Magazine Praise for Thomas A. Clark: “In short, one-breath clusters of lines, Clark meditates on the details one might observe during a contemplative and solitary walk through remote countryside. His diction is perfectly pitched and his grammar exact…this is about a man’s spiritual need for the humblest manifestations of nature.”

Shortlisted for the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2021. Longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2021. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020.

Postcolonial Love Poem | Natalie Diaz

Postcolonial Love Poem is a thunderous river of a book. It demands that every body carried in its pages – bodies of language, land, suffering brothers, enemies and lovers – be touched and held. Where the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dune fields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.

Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure
of bodies like hers and the people she loves. Her poetry questions what kind of future we might create, built from the choices we make now.

Life Without Air | Daisy Lafarge

When Louis Pasteur observed the process of fermentation, he noted that, while most organisms perished from lack of oxygen, some were able to thrive as ‘life without air’. In this capricious, dreamlike collection, characters and scenes traverse states of airlessness, from suffocating relationships and institutions, to toxic environments and ecstatic asphyxiations. Both compassionate and ecologically nuanced, this innovative collection bridges poetry and prose to interrogate the conditions necessary for survival.