Poets can help fight climate breakdown by making us “spellbound, full of wonder and beguiled” by nature, the poet laureate has said. Simon Armitage, who pledged to dedicate his writing and thinking to environmental issues when he was appointed poet laureate in 2019, has written a new book of poems called Blossomise, which he hopes will remind readers of the beauty of nature. Asked at the Hay festival in Powys about the role of poets in communicating the threat of climate breakdown, he said: “We do what we can.
My feeling about this book is it’s slightly different from my other work in that there’s a lot of praise and wonder in it. “I think if we are spellbound and full of wonder and beguiled by nature we’re just less likely to want to destroy it, we’ll carry on wanting to preserve it. That’s my approach.
“I wanted to celebrate and to recognise blossom as an incredibly joyful thing but I also wanted to write about the way the weather is upside down and the climate and the environment are in peril, and that blossom just the fact it’s coming at the wrong time of year or twice of year is a gesture and a symbol and an indication of some of those problems.” He said he started writing verse because of Ted Hughes, who was originally seen as a nature poet but now often understood as an environmental poet, and he had been inspired by the way “the main thing he did was to create wonder in those poems”. “You can’t be a nature writer these days without gett.
