The winners of the Ginkgo Prize will be announced at the Poetry in Aldeburgh festival, from 2 to 4 November
POETRY and nature have always gone hand in hand, but now there is new bite as poets increasingly address environmental issues, adding politics and activism to their literary armoury.
A big cash prize also helps. One of the biggest poetry prizes is the (formerly the Resurgence Prize), which closed for submissions on 15 August. It awards ÂŁ5000 to the best poem on an ecological theme.
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Sally Carruthers, executive director of the Poetry School, which helps manage the prize, says the recent rise of eco-poetry is being driven by the era in which we live and by people sharing their work on social media, particularly Instagram. “In times of political unrest, poetry thrives as an activist medium,” she says. “People have something gritty to write about.”
The best environmental poetry doesn’t berate or shout at you. Instead the signs are subtle, the absences and disturbances are cumulative, as in Karen McCarthy Woolf’s collection Seasonal Disturbances (). Here nature often seems ill at ease with itself: “No birds nesting or singing in the trees; / no bellowing, roaring or squeaking savage or small…”
“In times of political unrest, poetry thrives – there’s something gritty worth writing about”
Or take Beverley Bie Brahic’s poem The Fête du Miel, from her new book The Hotel Eden (). Here, bees are left confused by a shifting climate: “Last winter was so warm the bees thought / Summer never ended, the beekeepers write.”
Poetry about the environment has also been scooping up big prizes usually reserved for longer forms. In June, poet Robert Minhinnick won the Wales Book of the Year for his Diary of the Last Man () – poetry described as “environmentalism turned into elegy” by the judges.
Perhaps this isn’t surprising. Good poetry has the ability to pack an emotional punch without cliché and to avoid the didactic tone that can kill a piece of art. As Carruthers explains: “A great eco-poem must have an understanding of how we interact as species and ecosystems, that destruction and risk are part of the world in which we find ourselves and that we need to act now.”
While some of the best eco-poetry 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 ().
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 , runs workshops on eco-poetry and what he calls the “emotional impact of climate change”.
Hewitt, winner of the Resurgence Prize in 2017 with his poem Ilex, describes his new work (including Lantern, from Offord Road Books next year) as trying “to change, through poetry, the ways in which we view our relationship to the natural world”.
I was commissioned in June to write a series of mini-poems for Ice Alive, a sci-art project. As Joseph Cook, a co-founder of Ice Alive and a glacial microbiologist, explains: “The arts can add depth and value back to the science of climate change.”
Crucially, it can also engage those who haven’t found a way to express their unease at our endangered world.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Giving voice to a planet’s suffering”