I’m delighted to have been named Environmental Poet of the Year 2022-23 in this year’s Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets. They will be publishing Letters to Katłįà, which grew out of an exchange suggested by Katłįa Lafferty, a Yellowknives Dene First Nation author and journalist, who was climate writer-in-residence at West Vancouver Memorial Library in British Columbia in 2022.
Katłįa reached out to me when she discovered that I was a climate writer in residence too – the first in the world she told me! We wrote to each other (in verse, at her suggestion…) over the four months of her residency and this is my half of the correspondence.
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I’m looking forward to the Awards Evening at the British Library on Friday 9th December – my first visit to London in nearly three years! The event is open to the public, free and hybrid so you can attend in person or watch online. You can find booking details here.
Many congratulations to all the shortlisted poets and presses!
Perhaps people are needing some winter cheer this year more than usual – I’ve noticed lots of Christmas lights switched on early and various festive offerings around the place. In our house we don’t really mark Christmas but I do appreciate some light in the darkness around Solstice and New Year.
If you’d like to get in the Christmas spirit and celebrate Advent on 1st December, come along to the Candlestick Press launch of their Christmas pamphlets – Ten Poems about Angels and Christmas Stories – 7.30 – 9 pm. Most of the poets will be reading their poems from the anthologies plus another with a seasonal theme. You can find out more and book your free ticket here.
She’s light and wild enough yet to have more in common with meadow flowers.
Stubborn flickers of white and bruised chicory scissor through the grassy slope
while her grandmother, drab in sacking, nearer my age now, is stooped, almost
on her knees, apron weighed down with a harvest of scree and muddy limestone.
The girl’s face is tender though she already knows too much: a scarlet cloth
flares in the tumbled basket and jug. Thin trees jut against a northern sky –
all I can do is keep on, keep on walking towards them, and pick stones
from the furrowed page to make room for harebell, lady’s smock, three-leaf clover.
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On a recent visit to the Laing Art Gallery I was pleased to spend some time with The Stone Pickers again – touched by a small detail I hadn’t noticed when I wrote my poem: the small stone still caught in the girl’s apron.
The wall text tells us that:
Clausen (1852-1944) was the son of a decorative artist of Danish descent (It doesn’t tell us if this was his mother or his father). From 1867 to 1873, he attended design classes at South Kensington Schools (known today as the Royal College of Art), and subsequently studied in Paris…He was influenced by French plein-air painting – the practice of painting outdoors – and began to paint the rural field workers around his Hertfordshire home in the 1880s. The Stone Pickers was purchased in 1907 from Artists of the Northern Counties, a selling exhibition held annually at the Laing from 1905 until 1935. Clausen was an official artist during the First World War.
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Stonepicker from The Knucklebone Floor (Smokestack 2022).
To celebrate the launch of Startling, Kate Sweeney has made one of her wonderful animated mixed-media films in response to some extracts from the book. It’s available now and you can take a look at it here.
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Kate and I have worked together on a number of projects, including – for Writing the Climate – the collective filmpoem Murmuration.
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If our film of Startling touches you in any way at all, please share it wherever you can.
Dear Friends, As the UK government weakens previous protections and threatens to destroy precious habitats, the non-human world needs our very real, human action more than ever. And while words and imagination alone won’t bring threatened species back from the brink, poetry can open the door that leads to action. From the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf to the work of last month’s winners of the Laurel Prize for environmental poetry, poets have long-held a fascination with animal life, real and fantastical.Exploring human qualities like courage, wisdom and vulnerability through an animal lens, the expressions of the animal in poetry are many – as a kind of field guide or fable, to invoke allegory and warning, to question our shared sentience and subjectivity. Animals can be a source of comfort and solace, horror and humour, ciphers for trauma, as well as our companions and guides.
This week, the acclaimed poets Pascale Petit, Steve Ely, Linda France, and Seán Hewitt invite you to imagine the woodland margins of Suffolk without the once-common barn owl, a Cornish meadow without the sight of a stag retreating, the huge yellow eye of the rare stone curlew, and the incredible migration of the critically endangered European eel. Take a moment to wonder at the beauty and power of these creatures. And to remember that without the animal world and its human allies, the future is bleak indeed.
In the aftermath of the political tumult of the last few weeks, perhaps we could all use some animal therapy. But what will our new cabinet mean for the future of nature and our planet? In an era of impending catastrophe, it seems our MPs are “either asleep at the wheel or in denial”.
MP Watch puts our MPs’ climate commitments and vested interests under the magnifying glass in order to keep their consituents informed. At a time when truth and political transparency has never been more crucial, please consider donating to their fundraiser.
This year’s theme is ‘The Environment’ so here’s a poem from my new book Startling.
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Tree of Knowledge
Unseasonable damp heat seeds spores,
a contagious grey pallor curls the tips of leaves
into fists. I cut off the mouldy shoots. We are
writing this poem together. Stray trusses stay
out of reach without tilting a shaky wooden ladder
against the snaking trunk to clamber into uncertainty.
A woman, no scholar of gravity, who planted a sapling
(Saturn, Tree of Knowledge) bought by post
from the British Library, I want the poem and its tree
to last longer, survive. The fruit’s just starting to set,
downy thumbs of sweetness, apples-to-be, mildew
and artless balance willing. Inside the poem,
unrunged, inside nature, might we catch sight
of love and know where we live?
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Before the launch next week at Durham Book Festival, I’ll be hosting a workshop looking at how we might turn our concerns about ‘the environment’ into writing that catches the attention and has the potential to change minds and spur action.
You can find more information here. Look forward to seeing those of you who can make it at Clayport Library on Friday 14th October 4 – 5.30 and later at 7 in Collected bookshop. Lx
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P.S.
The poem is actually in couplets but once again I am confounded by WordPress’s blunt formatting – or my own lack of technical know-how. And so I surrender to digital wabi sabi and bow.
It’s very strange having a new book come out so soon in the wake of The Knucklebone Floor being in the spotlight – in fact it’s startling! But that is the anachronistic world of publishing, all loops and flashbacks. Time and the way we travel through it is one of the themes of the new book so maybe it’s a case of whatever you look at is looking back at you too.
So, as Writing the Climate is coming to a close, after three rollercoaster years on the stage of the world and its weather, a selection of my writing from that time is published in Startling, a joint venture between New Writing North and Faber. It will be officially launched at Durham Book Festival on Friday 14th October at 7pm in the new Collected bookshop. Tickets include a glass of wine and a copy of the book – but space is limited so if you’d like to come along, you’ll need to book very soon. I’m looking forward to marking the end of the residency in this way and letting Startling loose in the world.
Writing it has been a more documentary process than usual. The nature of the residency and the context of world events – the pandemic and accelerating climate urgency, alongside political and global upheaval – seemed to ask for a quite transparent bearing of witness and an honest recording of my own response, filtered through all the various collective and collaborative activities that the residency made possible. It’s been an immensely rich time, challenging and profound, and I hope I have done justice to it and there’s something in the book that will touch and resonate with readers. I still have notebooks full of research and reflections that I intend to revisit at some point in what will be yet another version of time travel.
Even though Startling interrogates endings and beginnings, charting the cycles of deep time, the writing itself will continue. At this stage I’m not sure where I’ll go next but there are some seeds of ideas that may or may not germinate. Mostly I’m looking forward to more open space and a less functional, more intentional dynamic in my writing process. We’ll see where that leads – and I hope that I can bring some of you along with me as I go – here or elsewhere (more on that later no doubt).
Other ‘endings’ are the final couple of sessions of our Listening to the Climate discussion space. The next one, on Tuesday 11th October 6 – 7.30 pm BST, will be looking at Episode 9: Consciousness. You can listen again here and book a free space here. The final gathering will be on 8th November, when we’ll be discussing the last episode, Regeneration. I really appreciate the way people have been able to share their deepest concerns and their imaginative responses to the podcasts and connect with each other around this subject of such importance for us as individuals and for our world.
The last last is the very last Writing Hour on Tuesday 25th October 1 – 2pm BST. This is where we come together to write in silence, encouraged by each other’s presence and shared focus, following (or not) a couple of prompts dropped in like pebbles in a pool. Again, I’ve been so inspired by people’s willingness to show up and have the courage to face the blank page with the state of the world in mind and track the movements of their imagination and memory, in community and solidarity with others. It’s a low impact, DIY, start-where-you-are kind of process that I hope has helped everyone who’s come along to find and nurture the seeds of their own unfolding time. Here in Autumn, the season that embodies both beginnings and endings, is an excellent spell for marking transitions, letting cause and effect be more congruent and aligned, and setting our compasses in the direction of love and wonder.
As journalist and yogi Mark Morford writes:
‘Stop thinking the global crisis is all there is and realize that for every ongoing war or religious outrage or environmental devastation, there are a thousand counterbalancing acts of staggering generosity and humanity and art and beauty happening all over the world right now on a breathtaking scale, from flower box to cathedral. Resist the temptation to drown in fatalism, to shake your head and sigh and just throw in the karmic towel. Realize this is the perfect moment to envision a reenchantment of the world, to change the energy, to step right up and crank up your personal volume. Right when it all seems dark and bitter and offensive and acrimonious and conflicted and bilious, there is your opening. Remember mystery. And, finally, believe in the seeds you plant. Believe you are part of a groundswell, a resistance, a seemingly small but actually very, very large impending transformation, the beginning of something important and potent and unstoppable.’
From Habit, Ability! at the NewBridge Project in Shieldfield, Newcastle – a neighbourhood I have a soft spot for as my father was born and went to school there.
In the final moments when only the most meaningful strands of life remain,
it’s really our human connections that rise to the top.
That’s the clarity that we get at the end of life.
But it was my parents who taught me from the earliest age
that we don’t have to wait until the end oflife
in order to recognize and act on the power of connection.
Dr. Vivek Murthy, US Surgeon General under Barack Obama
Thinking just now about patient urgency and/or urgent patience. Yes?
So, I’ve been riding the waves of the past few weeks in the little ark that is this year’s Laurel Prize. Down to Birmingham for Contains Strong Language and The Verb, where I was able to catch the PoliNations landscape in Victoria Square. Good to see the centre of the city colonised by plants and poetry, rain-catching trees and resting places.
You can listen to this episode of The Verb on catch-up here.
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Then on to Yorkshire Sculpture Park for a day of readings and workshops. One of my favourite places, it was wonderful to be there on a day of sunshine, lighting up Robert Indiana’s powerful sculptures – the world of words and numbers re-imagined in his colourful configurations.
You can watch the prize ceremony, hosted by Simon Armitage, here and listen to us all read poems from the winning collections. Absolutely delighted that The Knucklebone Floor has been honoured in this way that highlights the past year’s poetry books entangling themselves with nature and the land. Chair of the judges, Glyn Maxwell, said:
‘Linda France’s The Knucklebone Floor leaves one with a sense of being guided through an infinite afternoon, green thoughts in green shades. The distant past and the dimly arriving future seem balanced in the hands of the blessèd guide who leads the reader through, a deep feminine spirit here to reclaim what can be reclaimed from the wreck of where we are, here to suggest myriad paths out of the wilderness. A work of deep music and wisdom, an enchanted garden of a book.’
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Everyone’s been so kind and warm in offering their congratulations – I’m very grateful – thank you thank you thank you!
I’ll be reading from it, alongside Helen Mort (whose latest collection, The Illustrated Woman, has been shortlisted for this year’s Forward Prize) at the Leper Chapel, Ripon, on Sunday 25th September 7.30pm – the closing event of Ripon Poetry Festival.
If you’d like to buy a copy of The Knucklebone Floor, please visit the Smokestack website or order it from your local bookshop.
Botanical 