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Giving voice to a planet's suffering
CULTURE
Giving voice to a planet’s suffering Poetry can express our environmental crisis in a more human way, says Niall Firth
PLAINPICTURE/MINT IMAGES
While some of the best ecopoetry is about the resilience of nature, other works address the ways our changing climate affects minds and bodies. Carrie Etter’s pamphlet Scar, for example, is a single poem about the effects of climate change on her home state of Illinois: “more tornadoes / one scours a half-mile-wide path through Fairdale / flattens / twists / hurls homes / cars / a child’s treehouse / its scar in the earth visible / from space”. It will be included in her collection The Weather in Normal (Seren Books). Other poets, like Dom Bury and Seán Hewitt, are bridging the gap between the personal and the global. Bury, the winner of last year’s prestigious UK National Poetry Competition for The Opened Field, runs workshops on eco-poetry and what he calls the “emotional impact of A decline in honeybee populations: climate change”. trouble that’s hard to put into words Hewitt, winner of the Resurgence Prize in 2017 with his poem Ilex, describes his new work ended, the beekeepers write.” (including Lantern, from Offord Poetry about the environment Road Books next year) as trying has also been scooping up big prizes usually reserved for longer “to change, through poetry, the ways in which we view our forms. In June, poet Robert relationship to the natural world”. Minhinnick won the Wales Book I was commissioned in June to of the Year for his Diary of the Last Man (Carcanet) – poetry described write a series of mini-poems for Ice Alive, a sci-art project. As as “environmentalism turned Joseph Cook, a co-founder of Ice into elegy” by the judges. Alive and a glacial microbiologist, Perhaps this isn’t surprising. explains: “The arts can add depth Good poetry has the ability and value back to the science of to pack an emotional punch climate change.” without cliché and to avoid the Crucially, it can also engage didactic tone that can kill a piece those who haven’t found a way of art. As Carruthers explains: to express their unease at our “A great eco-poem must have an understanding of how we interact endangered world. ■ as species and ecosystems, that destruction and risk are part of the The winners of the Ginkgo Prize will be announced at the Poetry in Aldeburgh world in which we find ourselves festival, from 2 to 4 November and that we need to act now.”
POETRY and nature have always The best environmental poetry gone hand in hand, but now there doesn’t berate or shout at you. is new bite as poets increasingly Instead the signs are subtle, the address environmental issues, absences and disturbances are adding politics and activism to cumulative, as in Karen McCarthy their literary armoury. Woolf’s collection Seasonal A big cash prize also helps. Disturbances (Carcanet). Here One of the biggest poetry prizes nature often seems ill at ease is the Ginkgo Prize (formerly the with itself: “No birds nesting Resurgence Prize), which closed or singing in the trees; / no for submissions on 15 August. It awards £5000 to the best poem “In times of political unrest, poetry thrives – on an ecological theme. there’s something gritty Sally Carruthers, executive worth writing about” director of the Poetry School, which helps manage the prize, says the recent rise of eco-poetry bellowing, roaring or squeaking is being driven by the era in which savage or small…” we live and by people sharing Or take Beverley Bie Brahic’s their work on social media, poem The Fête du Miel, from particularly Instagram. “In times her new book The Hotel Eden of political unrest, poetry thrives (Carcanet). Here, bees are left as an activist medium,” she says. confused by a shifting climate: “People have something gritty to “Last winter was so warm the write about.” bees thought / Summer never 44 | NewScientist | 15 September 2018
Giving voice to a planet’s suffering Poetry can express our environmental crisis in a more human way, says Niall Firth
PLAINPICTURE/MINT IMAGES
While some of the best ecopoetry is about the resilience of nature, other works address the ways our changing climate affects minds and bodies. Carrie Etter’s pamphlet Scar, for example, is a single poem about the effects of climate change on her home state of Illinois: “more tornadoes / one scours a half-mile-wide path through Fairdale / flattens / twists / hurls homes / cars / a child’s treehouse / its scar in the earth visible / from space”. It will be included in her collection The Weather in Normal (Seren Books). Other poets, like Dom Bury and Seán Hewitt, are bridging the gap between the personal and the global. Bury, the winner of last year’s prestigious UK National Poetry Competition for The Opened Field, runs workshops on eco-poetry and what he calls the “emotional impact of A decline in honeybee populations: climate change”. trouble that’s hard to put into words Hewitt, winner of the Resurgence Prize in 2017 with his poem Ilex, describes his new work ended, the beekeepers write.” (including Lantern, from Offord Poetry about the environment Road Books next year) as trying has also been scooping up big prizes usually reserved for longer “to change, through poetry, the ways in which we view our forms. In June, poet Robert relationship to the natural world”. Minhinnick won the Wales Book I was commissioned in June to of the Year for his Diary of the Last Man (Carcanet) – poetry described write a series of mini-poems for Ice Alive, a sci-art project. As as “environmentalism turned Joseph Cook, a co-founder of Ice into elegy” by the judges. Alive and a glacial microbiologist, Perhaps this isn’t surprising. explains: “The arts can add depth Good poetry has the ability and value back to the science of to pack an emotional punch climate change.” without cliché and to avoid the Crucially, it can also engage didactic tone that can kill a piece those who haven’t found a way of art. As Carruthers explains: to express their unease at our “A great eco-poem must have an understanding of how we interact endangered world. ■ as species and ecosystems, that destruction and risk are part of the The winners of the Ginkgo Prize will be announced at the Poetry in Aldeburgh world in which we find ourselves festival, from 2 to 4 November and that we need to act now.”
POETRY and nature have always The best environmental poetry gone hand in hand, but now there doesn’t berate or shout at you. is new bite as poets increasingly Instead the signs are subtle, the address environmental issues, absences and disturbances are adding politics and activism to cumulative, as in Karen McCarthy their literary armoury. Woolf’s collection Seasonal A big cash prize also helps. Disturbances (Carcanet). Here One of the biggest poetry prizes nature often seems ill at ease is the Ginkgo Prize (formerly the with itself: “No birds nesting Resurgence Prize), which closed or singing in the trees; / no for submissions on 15 August. It awards £5000 to the best poem “In times of political unrest, poetry thrives – on an ecological theme. there’s something gritty Sally Carruthers, executive worth writing about” director of the Poetry School, which helps manage the prize, says the recent rise of eco-poetry bellowing, roaring or squeaking is being driven by the era in which savage or small…” we live and by people sharing Or take Beverley Bie Brahic’s their work on social media, poem The Fête du Miel, from particularly Instagram. “In times her new book The Hotel Eden of political unrest, poetry thrives (Carcanet). Here, bees are left as an activist medium,” she says. confused by a shifting climate: “People have something gritty to “Last winter was so warm the write about.” bees thought / Summer never 44 | NewScientist | 15 September 2018