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 拢5000 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. 鈥淚n times of political unrest, poetry thrives as an activist medium,鈥� she says. 鈥淧eople have something gritty to write about.鈥�
The best environmental poetry doesn鈥檛 berate or shout at you. Instead the signs are subtle, the absences and disturbances are cumulative, as in Karen McCarthy Woolf鈥檚 collection Seasonal Disturbances (). Here nature often seems ill at ease with itself: 鈥淣o birds nesting or singing in the trees; / no bellowing, roaring or squeaking savage or small鈥︹��
鈥淚n times of political unrest, poetry thrives 鈥� there鈥檚 something gritty worth writing about鈥�
Or take Beverley Bie Brahic鈥檚 poem The F锚te du Miel, from her new book The Hotel Eden (). Here, bees are left confused by a shifting climate: 鈥淟ast winter was so warm the bees thought / Summer never ended, the beekeepers write.鈥�
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 () 鈥� poetry described as 鈥渆nvironmentalism turned into elegy鈥� by the judges.
Perhaps this isn鈥檛 surprising. Good poetry has the ability to pack an emotional punch without clich茅 and to avoid the didactic tone that can kill a piece of art. As Carruthers explains: 鈥淎 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.鈥�
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鈥檚 pamphlet Scar, for example, is a single poem about the effects of climate change on her home state of Illinois: 鈥渕ore tornadoes / one scours a half-mile-wide path through Fairdale / flattens / twists / hurls homes / cars / a child鈥檚 treehouse / its scar in the earth visible / from space鈥�. It will be included in her collection The Weather in Normal ().
Other poets, like Dom Bury and Se谩n Hewitt, are bridging the gap between the personal and the global. Bury, the winner of last year鈥檚 prestigious UK National Poetry Competition for , runs workshops on eco-poetry and what he calls the 鈥渆motional impact of climate change鈥�.
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 鈥渢o change, through poetry, the ways in which we view our relationship to the natural world鈥�.
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: 鈥淭he arts can add depth and value back to the science of climate change.鈥�
Crucially, it can also engage those who haven鈥檛 found a way to express their unease at our endangered world.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淕iving voice to a planet鈥檚 suffering鈥�