The Daily News

The late 20th and now the 21st century have been characterised by fierce squabbles about the nature of climate change – or, indeed, its very existence – and a shift in discourse about the role of human beings in the global ecology. This is evident across the sciences, and in the social sciences as well as humanities and arts disciplines. Political scientists John Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering, for example, urge us to listen ‘not just to human voices, but also to the non-human components that cannot speak like humans do – but to whose signals we can try to listen better’. And after listening, they say, we should reflect, recognise and respond to the cries of the world – that is, engage in a process of reflexivity that (you never know!) might mobilise political and economic change.

The poems in this collection arise to some extent out of my considerations of the scholarship on the topic, but not consciously: they are the product of me living through recent years of floods, fire and pandemic; and living for decades in a place where the natural world speaks so clearly to anyone who would listen. “We must love one another or die”, says Auden (in one version of his ‘September 1, 1939’); and humans – I think, I hope – increasingly recognise that ‘one another’ encompasses all the things of this beautiful, broken planet