Loving Nature in Troubled Times

A slightly different line-up for last night’s event after, sadly, Jude Rosen became ill with Covid and her joint launch with Derrick Porter had to be postponed. Alex Josephy and Jane McLaughlin were joined by Rosie Johnston and Mick Delap (thank you Rosie and Mick for stepping in at the eleventh hour!) for a reading with a different flavour, but still very much focused on the natural world. From unwanted mice in an Italian kitchen, to the mighty ocean, to bathing huts, to anxiety about climate crisis and possibly a thread of hope… and many birds, trees and water, water, water.

The event’s proximity to National Poetry Day gave me the idea to invite everyone on my mailing list to send in their favourite nature poem. A difficult, almost impossible task, it seems, because there are so many to chose from. Like favourite pieces of music, they also keep on changing. But of the ones sent in, the poets picked a few of the shorter ones and read them in the second half. Rich Sylvester, who had sent his favourite poem, was in the audience and read it himself, beautifully. In the first half the poets introduced their own work by reading a nature poem that inspired them in a particular way.

The feedback about this particular format, both from the sizeable, appreciative and knowledgeable audience and the poets themselves (and me!) was very positive. In a strange way, hearing a ‘classical’ poem first, whether well known or not (and most were not), induced a silent aha moment and a deeper level of listening.

The variety of voices and themes-within-the-theme was astounding and yet there were so many echoes and resonances.Here are some photos of the event.

Thanks to Kim and David at West Greenwich Library for all their help, and in particular to Kim for taking some of the photos.

Please scroll down for a selection of poems chosen by you and by the poets themselves.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree – W.B. Yeats
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Sea-Fever – John Masefield
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud – William Wordsworth
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

The Trees – Philip Larkin
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

My Early Home – John Clare
Here sparrows build upon the trees,
And stock-dove hides her nest:
The leaves are winnowed by the breeze
Into a calmer rest;
The black-cap’s song was very sweet;
That used the rose to kiss;
It made the paradise complete:
My early home was this.

The redbreast from the sweetbrier bush
Dropt down to pick the worm;
On the horse-chestnut sang the thrush,
O’er the house where I was born.
The moonlight, like a shower of pearls,
Fell o’er this ‘bower of bliss’,
And on the bench sat boys and girls;
My early home was this.

The old house stooped just like a cave,
Thatched o’er with mosses green;
Winter around the walls would rave,
But all was calm within;
The trees are here all green again,
Here bees the flowers still kiss,
But flowers and trees seemed sweeter then;
My early home was this.

Infinity – Giacomo Leopardi, in a translation by Jonathan Galassi
This lonely hill was always dear to me,
and this hedgerow, which cuts off the view
of so much of the last horizon.
But sitting here and gazing, I can see
beyond, in my mind’s eye, unending spaces,
and superhuman silences, and depthless calm,
till what I feel
is almost fear. And when I hear
the wind stir in these branches,
I begin comparing that endless stillness with this noise;
and the eternal comes to mind,
and the dead seasons, and the present
living one, and how it sounds.
So my mind sinks in this immensity:
and foundering is sweet in such a sea.

Postscript – Seamus Heaney
And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening – Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Turtle Island 1969 – Gary Snyder
The rising hills, the slopes
Of statistics
Lie before us
The steep climb
Of everything going up,
Up, as we all
Go down.
In the next century
Or the one beyond that,
They say
Are valleys, pastures,
We can meet there in peace
If we can make it.
To climb these coming crests
One word to you, to
You and your children:
Stay together
Learn the flowers
Go light.

Chance Verses – Chang Liang-Ch’en, twelfth century
Whose are this pond and house?
I lean on the red door yet dare not knock.
But a fragment of sweet
Spring cannot be hidden,
as over the coloured wall
there peeps the tip of an apricot branch.

East of the City in Early Spring – Yang Chu-Yuan (c 760-832)
For the poet the purest aspect is at new Spring.
When the willow’s yellow has not yet equalled its green.
If I wait till the flowers of Shanglin Park are like brocade
All men would go out of doors to see the flowers.
Translations by Robert Kotewall and Norman L Smith

Greenwich Park – Herbert Lomas
Spring’s come, a little late, in the park:
a tree-rat smokes flat S’s over the lawn.
A mallard has somehow forgotten something
it can’t quite remember. Daffodils yawn,
prick their ears, push their muzzles out
for a kiss. Pansies spoof pensive
Priapus faces: Socrates or Verlaine.
A cock-pigeon is sexually harassing
a hen: pecking and poking and padding
behind her impertinently, bowing and mowing.
But when he’s suddenly absent-minded –
can’t keep even sex in his head –
she trembles, stops her gadding, doubts
and grazes his way. He remembers and pouts.

Lulu – Stevie Smith
I do not care for Nature,
She does not care for me;
You can be alone with a person,
You can’t be alone with a tree.

Voices from the Blog

Tuesday, May 14 – an evening of poetry from eight poets present on the Mary Evans Picture Library ‘Poems and Pictures’ Blog.

https://www.maryevans.com/poetry.php?prv=menu

An evening to remember and honour Gill Stoker (1954-2024), who first devised the Blog in 2015 and continued to curate it until she was stopped by her illness last year. By the way, the Blog continues under the stewardship of Mark Braund. Do explore the website and find out how to submit poems, and also more about Gill ad the Library.

Gill and I collaborated on a number of poetry and poetry-related events, and continued to plan during her illness. This event was the result of this planning. It had to be on Zoom because of the location of several of the poets. Despite minor techie issues (minor, but giving me major panic!), the evening went smoothly.

The voices we were treated to were so diverse and the poems were moving, sombre, political but also funny and quirky – and always word-perfect.

The readers were Natan Barreto, David Bottomley, Wendy French, Sue Hubbard, Maggie MacKay, Marion McCready, Hugh McMillan and Jill Sharp.

Each read one poem from the Blog, accompanied by the image that inspired them or best echoed their words, plus a few other poems from recent collections. They took us from war zones through historic expeditions, London Soho, ekphrastic poetry, imaginary conversations between Dylan Thomas and his wife, Moscow in the ’70s, the NHS, hedgerows and near-anthropomorphic flowers and birds to family memories, migration, buses and their passengers, Dirk Bogarde, to end with the ubiquitous round paper lantern (it will never look or feel pedestrian again, after Jill Sharp’s perfectly observed verses…).

The contrasting tones, styles and forms danced beautifully together, bouncing off each other and making us sit up in recognition as images, like the words in Natan Barreto’s poem about language, emerge as never predictable, but inevitable…

As a sort of brief ‘interval’ I shared a recorded message from Mark Braund, in which he spoke a bit about the Blog and Gill and read a poem by Gill’s late husband, the composer Richard Stoker. Gill was so proud of Richard’s achievements, it seemed fitting to end the ‘interval’ with Mark’s reading of Richard’s poem inspired by the death of Francis Poulenc. Richard was in Paris at the time, studying with Nadia Boulanger, and was shocked by Poulenc’s untimely death.

The event was recorded and I shall post the precise way to access it once some editing has been carried out if necessary. It is likely to be made available on the Mary Evans YouTube channel.

Here’s some information about the poets, their publications and their impressive achievements. I shall shortly add some more information about where to purchase their collections. In the meantime, if you’re interested, you can contact the publishers or myself.

Natan Barreto was born in Salvador, Brazil. He has lived in Rio, Paris, Rome, and, since 1992, in London, where he works as a primary school teacher. He is the author of seven collections of poetry in Portuguese. Fluent in many languages, he has also published a novel and a volume of translations from French of work by Madagascan writer Jean-Joseph Rabearivel.

David Bottomley is an award-winning poet, playwright and librettist with a passion for environmental and ecological conservation. His play Waterton’s Wild Menagerie was a finalist of the Nick Darke Award; Britain for Breakfast, finalist Enter Stage Write Award and Limboland, finalist at Herts and Essex Playwriting Festival. His plays have been performed at Edinburgh, Manchester, San Diego Fringe Festivals, Birmingham and London theatres. He works nationally and internationally with composers to set his writing to music. He was commissioned by the charity Rising Tides to write the environmental play King Neptune and the Mermaid. David recently obtained an MA in Opera Making and Writing at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, for which he was commissioned to write the opera Lanternfish. 

Wendy French has three collections of poetry published: Splintering the Dark (Rockingham Press, 2005), surely you know this (Tall Lighthouse, 2009), and Thinks Itself A Hawk (Hippocrates Press, 2016), the latter resulting from her time as Poet in Residence at the UCH Macmillan Cancer Centre, 2014-2015. She was joint editor with Dilys Wood of Fanfare (Second Light, 2015), a book of poems written by women poets, and also co-edited The Hippocrates Book of the Heart (Hippocrates Press, 2017) with Prof Michael Hulse and Prof Donald Singer. She won the Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine Prize (NHS section) in 2010 and was awarded second prize in 2011. Her collaboration with Jane Kirwan resulted in the book Born in the NHS (Hippocrates Press, 2013). She has judged or co-judged three major poetry competitions: the Torbay International Competition, the Torriano Competition and the Tongues and Grooves 10-year celebration competition, as well as the Hippocrates International Poetry Competition for poems relating to medicine or the body. For the past twenty years she has facilitated creative writing in healthcare settings, having finished her formal teaching career as head of the Maudsley and Bethlem Hospital School in 2003.

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance art critic, with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She is twice winner of the London Writers Competition, with a third prize in the National Poetry Competition. Her publications include Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon), Ghost Station, The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (Salt), and The Idea of Islands (Occasional Press). Swimming to Albania, her fourth collection, was published by Salmon Press in 2021, and Pushkin Press published her fourth novel Flatlands in 2023. Twenty of her poems were included in An Anthology: Carcanet 2000. Her poetry has been recorded for The Poetry Sound Archive, read on Poetry Please, The Verb and Front Row, and appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, as well as in The Irish Times and The Observer. She has published a collection of short stories, Rothko’s Red (Salt), and two novels, Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis) and Girl in White (Cinnamon Press), for which she received a major Arts Council Award. Her third novel, Rainsongs, was published in 2018 to great critical acclaim from The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Irish Independent and The Jewish Chronicle, among many others. As an art critic she has written regularly for many leading newspapers and art magazines. Her selected art writings, Adventures in Art, are published by Other Criteria. As The Poetry Society’s only Public Art Poet, she was responsible for London’s largest public art poem, ‘Eurydice’, in the IMAX tunnel at Waterloo, commissioned as part of the South Bank regeneration.

A retired Scottish support teacher for young people with additional needs, Maggie MacKay took up her writing again and began a thrilling new life. After studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, her pamphlet The Heart of the Run (Picaroon Poetry 2018) with Kate Garrett was followed by her debut collection A West Coast Psalter  (Kelsey Books 2021). In 2020 her poem ‘How to Distil a Guid Scotch Malt’ was awarded a place in the Poetry Archive’s WordView permanent collection and was a runner up in The Liverpool Prize. Steve Cawte at Impspired Press published her second collection The Babel of Human Travel in November 2022. She reviews poetry collections and pamphlets at The Friday Poem (https://thefridaypoem.com). Maggie loves a good malt and cool jazz as much as daydreaming on the sofa with Hattie, her marvellous rescue greyhound.

Marion McCready lives in Argyll. Her poems have been published widely including in Poetry (Chicago), Edinburgh Review, The Glasgow Herald and have appeared in multiple anthologies. Her pamphlet collection Vintage Sea was published by Calder Wood Press (2011). She is the winner of a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and the Melita Hume Poetry Prize and the author of two poetry collections from Eyewear Publishing: Tree Language (2014) and Madame Ecosse (2017). Her most recent collection, Look to the Crocus, was published by Shoestring Press in 2023.  

Hugh McMillan is a well published, anthologised and broadcast poet, writer and performer who lives in South West Scotland. His last collection Haphazardly in the Starless Night was published by Luath Press in 2021 and Diverted to Split, his latest, is due out in summer 2024.  In 2021 he was appointed editor of the Scottish Poetry Library’s anthology ‘Best Scottish Poems’ and was also chosen to be a Saltire Society judge for Best Scottish Poetry Collection of the Year. His cult classic ‘McMillan’s Galloway’ was reprinted in paperback form in May 2023, and ‘Whit If’, his Scottish History poems are to be reprinted in April 2024. His website is at https://www.hughmcmillanwriter.co.uk/

Jill Sharp has worked as a tutor with the Open University and has also taught excluded teenagers. Her poetry has been published in many magazines including Acumen, Envoi, The Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter’s House, Mslexia, Prole, Poetry Salzburg Review, Stand, and Under the Radar. Her work has also appeared in various anthologies, most recently Pale Fire (Frogmore Press) and Contemporary Gothic Verse (Emma Press), as well as online at And Other Poems, Ink, Sweat and Tears and London Grip. Her pamphlet Ye gods was published by Indigo Dreams (2015), and she was one of six poets in Vindication, an anthology from Arachne Press (2018). Her poem ‘Cemetery crow’ was placed joint-second in the 2020 Keats-Shelley Prize. Jill was a founder member of Swindon’s BlueGate Poets, and she has run regular writing workshops at the Richard Jefferies Museum at Coate.