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I took this poem from “The Man Who Went Into The West,” Byron Rogers’s marvellous and funny biography of the Welsh poet R S Thomas, a man so curmudgeonly that when asked by English tourists for directions he, one of the greatest lyrical poets writing in English, would reply “no English.” He preferred solitude to…
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Adders which bite when provoked Narrow paths near sheer drops Trees and branches which can fall at any time Sand which can collapse and suffocate Ponies which can bite. Enjoy your walk.
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Yesterday I stepped down after six years as the chair of the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change. The Alliance brings together 54 organisations of health professionals, including most of the royal colleges, to do what we can to counter the climate and nature crisis. We work to mitigate the crisis, promote adaptation, and explain…
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You’ll Never Walk Alone is more a song than a poem. What I mean by that is that there are many recorded versions of the song, but you won’t encounter it in an anthology of poems. The words are anaemic read on the page, but most of us hear the tune as we read the poem—and…
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This is the third poem I’ve posted by Wendell Berry (1934–), an American poet whom I discovered only this year. I love the directness and earthiness of his poetry. As well as being a poet he is a farmer and an environmental campaigner. He entered my life again when a doctor from Hawaii sent me…
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I found this poem in Robert A Caro’s massive biography of Robert Moses, “the man who built New York.” The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York, tells how Moses, without ever being elected, achieved remarkable power that allowed him to shape New York according to his vision over 40 years. The chapter…
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These three poems on death by three of the greatest poets in English—William Shakespeare (1564-1616), W B Yeats (1865-1939), and T S Eliot (1888-1965)—are all very familiar to me—and probably to you. If you are reading even one of them for the first time you are in for a treat. I came across the three…
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This famous poem by the German priest Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) came into my mind because of the orgy of hate that is being whipped up in Britain against asylum seekers. I’m currently on a large, well-equipped boat crossing the English Channel. I look in to the cold waves and think how terrifying it must be to cross this…
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Until around a century ago many children died without reaching adulthood. A couple might have seven children and five or even all of them die. It’s still the case in some low-income countries. The death of a child now is a catastrophe, even though children may be more comfortable with death than adults, but we…
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E O Wilson (1929-2021) is an American biologist, the inventor of sociobiology, a lover of ants, and a gifted writer who twice won the Pulitzer Prize and first warned us of the dangers of biodiversity loss. I took the found poem below from The Diversity of Life published in 1992. Wilson in his taxonomic diagnosis is thinking…
A Cairn of Poems 