Tag Archive for: poetry

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

The Rime of the Modern Mariner | Nick Hayes

 

The story is exactly what it sounds like: a modern retelling of the Coleridge poem. Told by a grizzled old codger to a young screen-eyed stranger in a park, Hayes takes the original eco-fable and updates it, weaving in plastic pollution and the dehumanisation of humanity when disconnected from the natural world. There are vengeful apparitions, oil slicks and raging tsunamis, not to mention the endlessly mounting corpses of the creatures of the ocean.

Hayes’s poetry is lyrical and energetic, alternately summoning laughter, tears, and moments of reflection. But the real magic at play here is the artwork. Reminiscent of Japanese woodcuts, there’s a simplicity to his highly-detailed lines that allows breathing space while demanding fervent attention.

Of course, you won’t be surprised to learn that nobody listens to our modern mariner. His tale is disregarded as the ravings of a mad hobo, and he is left alone on a park bench, listening to the wind and wondering at the strangeness of humanity. – Philip Webb Gregg

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening | Robert Frost

 

Robert Frost’s classic poem receives a child-like twist through charming illustrations by Susan Jeffers. This picture book, which has been in print since 1978, is beloved by generations of children for its evocations of New England winters and a man with “promises to keep.” It’s a beautifully illustrated tale about human interconnectedness with nature, even in the depths of winter.

Suitable for Children Age 4-12

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