Human Impact on Nature, Landscape and Climate (E13), Place (3), Sunday 7th November 2021, 12-1 pm
With Sarah Westcott, Steph Morris, Anna Saunders and Dom Bury. This event was hosted by Jan Heritage
This event brings together four poets all exploring in their own way our human relationship with nature, landscape and climate, conscious of our footprint, and the impact of our lives on our environment. Sarah Westcott’s first collection was described by Jacob Polley as 'fierce with intelligence’. Reading from her follow-up, Bloom, the poems approach the cultural and physical spaces where human and non-human lives co-exist or lead to species loss. Steph Morris' pamphlet Please don’t trample us; we are trying to grow! takes us on a temporal and psycho-geographical journey through both the urban and rural and ‘shines a light on small, devastating human cruelties’ but where ‘love persistently comes through’ (Jacqueline Saphra). In her latest book, Feverfew, Anna Saunders, poet and director of the Cheltenham Poetry festival, weaves together personae of myth such as Phaethon, Jupiter, Pan, and Aphrodite with a clear-voiced contemporary disquiet about a planet threatened by human-led climate destruction and passionate, nakedly confessional poems. Dom Bury, former National Poetry Competition winner, reads from his much-awaited debut Rite of Passage, a book that is an initiation into what it means to be alive on the planet in the midst of extinction, and of environmental collapse, and a journey into the shadow of man’s distorted relationship with the earth.
