Two new dynamic ecopoetry books
river / run by Helen Moore
river / run a trilogy of long-form landscape ecopoems about British rivers and Atlantic Salmon written by Helen Moore in collaboration with scientists and artists responding to the climate and wider ecological crisis. Complementing the ecopoems are photographs by David Buckland, installations by Animate Earth Collective and Hanien Conradie, and river paintings by Jim Murray.
This ecopoetic trilogy of long-form landscape poems about British rivers and Wild Atlantic Salmon has emerged out of my twenty-year creative practice as a pioneering ecopoet and socially engaged artist. Grounded in a commitment to support the shift towards an ecocentric paradigm, my work recognises our intrinsic interdependence with the more-than-human world, and the catastrophic harms that our collective anthropocentrism is causing. Hence my use of the prefix ‘eco’ to define my poetry. In seeking to avoid reproducing the values of dominant discourse, I endow the common names of wild beings with an initial capital, a typographic attempt to raise their status from the margins to which our culture has relegated them. Similarly, I eschew ‘it’, preferring ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘they’ when sex is unclear, and I use ‘who’ instead of ‘which’ to show that these are sentient subjects with their own agency.
Waterdrop by Clare Whistler and Kay Syrad
Kay Syrad and Clare Whistler are recent graduates of the New School of the Anthropocene, where they created a Cloak for Courage in this time of eco-crisis. They are both Fellows of the RSA and the Cloak was displayed this summer at the RSA London. As the composite eco-poet kin’d & kin’d, the duo write collaboratively and run a range of eco-poetry courses and events. They are co-editors of several anthologies including Wild Correspondings: an eco-poetry source book (Elephant Press, 2021).
Kay has published two novels and her fourth collection of poetry is due out in autumn 2025. She was Poetry Editor of the long-running journal Envoi from 2014-2020 and writes poetry reviews and essays about visual art. Kays’s art-text ‘work of the lightship men: 1000 tasks’ was purchased by the National Maritime Museum for their permanent collection.
In October 2022, the artist performer Clare Whistler and eco poet Kay Syrad came for a weeklong residency at Cape Farewell’s HQ, The WaterShed, exploring in minutia and physically this watery place. The day started with a plunge into the cold waters of the lake and then mapped into a series of tasks – each a recorded exploration. In a world so stressed by the lack of water, its abundance here is at times overwhelming, mapping its past life as a watercress farm. A historically complex series of waterways reflect on sustainable human management, what Robert Macfarlane would call the ‘old ways’. Clare and Kay’s journey through this watery microsite was more slither than ‘on foot’, and their beautiful record of this slithering is celebrated here in words, well-crafted poems and photographs.
