‘We are in the inferno’: diaspora writers lead new movement of nature poetry

UK anthology inspired by question: ‘Where are our black and Asian nature writers?’ has boosted interest in genre

A new movement of eco poets from black and brown communities in the UK is challenging the canon of nature poetry against the backdrop of the climate and biodiversity crisis.

Mona Arshi, who co-edited the first UK collection of eco poetry from African, Asian and Caribbean diaspora voices, was inspired to put the anthology together after asking in a social media post that went viral: “Where are all our black and Asian nature writers?”

She said: “It was not that people were not writing in those spaces but they hadn’t been gathered, they hadn’t been published, or in some cases their poetry has not been framed as nature poetry. So the process was like lifting a veil. It was like a visibility project.”

The anthology, Nature Matters, has been taken up in the past year in universities and some schools and has boosted interest in nature poetry from perspectives very different to white, western and mainstream culture.

The new movement of nature poetry has as a powerful theme the destruction of nature, which is happening at rates unprecedented in human history as a result of global heating, intensive agricultural practices, pollution and the exploitation of natural resources.

The movement unpicks and challenges the nature of the pastoral, who gets access to it and who has had ownership of the genre of nature poetry.

As the UK-based Jamaican poet Jason Allen-Paisant writes in his offering for the anthology:

It’s time to write about daffodils
again.

Arshi said: “Today we are in a very different place to where the 18th-century Romantic poets were. We are in the inferno, whereas for them it was approaching. I feel you cannot be writing about natural beauty today in a poem without it being burdened with ideas of climate catastrophe.”

Connections between poetry and nature have been centuries made, with the natural world providing inspiration and metaphor for some of the best-known poets in the English language, such as William Wordsworth, John Keats and John Clare.

Simon Armitage pledged to dedicate his writing to environmental issues when he was appointed as poet laureate in 2019 and has long argued that poets can help fight climate breakdown by making the reader “spellbound, full of wonder and beguiled” by nature.

Ralph Pite, a professor of English at Bristol University who specialises in studying the relationship between literature and the physical world, said the new generation of nature poets brought forward ways of thinking about the environment that mainstream western culture had ignored, neglected, erased or consigned to the past.

“Through their poetry, everyone gains the right to roam in the natural world; it’s no longer available only to the RP speaker or the white, educated, middle-class person,” Pite said. “So they show that England can belong to everyone in our society, that the landscape does not have to convey a narrow idea of what Englishness is – that we can get beyond that historical divisiveness, which has erected barriers of class, region and ethnicity.”

Arshi said that as a child she felt very alienated from the countryside. “I was born in the UK into a Sikh Punjabi family; we lived near Heathrow. Entering the countryside was never part of my childhood. Anytime we had encountered nature, the countryside when I was growing up, it was quite hostile, and it felt very alien to be in those landscapes. So later I didn’t consider myself a nature poet at all.”

But after being selected to be poet in residence at Cley Marshes in Norfolk, she started asking what qualifies as nature poetry, who is deemed a nature poet and why.

“What is happening now with the anthology is wonderful,” she said. “Anthologies are slow and impactful in the culture. They hit the bloodstream of a culture because they get shared and used in schools, in universities, and that is what is happening now and it is wonderful.”

Jos Smith, an associate professor of English literature at the University of East Anglia, said the work had become part of his teaching. “This anthology is long overdue in the UK,” he said. “Eco poetry has in the past always tended to be quite white, and it is good to see students responding to the kind of poetry in Nature Matters, which has a greater level of complexity and problematises things like nationhood and language in a way that is quite new for British eco poetry.”