In the last month or so I’ve been helping an American book artist, Heather Green, who is currently based at Cardiff University on a Fulbright-Cardiff University Scholar Award. She has been busy collecting information and making visual work about the many aspects of the Severn Estuary, with the help of the geographer Owain Jones. She’s also been meeting people who can contribute and drafting out the layout of the four interrelated books she’s proposing to make. On the Bahía Adair in Spanish and English and on the Severn in Welsh and English.

I first met Heather some years back when she was over in the South West to scope what could be done to develop an estuary project here. A project that will parallel her other concerned with an estuary, that of Bahía Adair, a large embayment in the northern Gulf of California in Sonora, Mexico. The Bahia Adair is a place she’s known since childhood. Taking as one of her starting points Lucy Lippard’s claim that: “Untold land is unknown land,” Heather is working on the basis that our engagement with place through names, maps and photographs can help to authenticate our communal imagination, our sense of history and identity, and in doing so can support and validate stewardship and conservation.

Last evening I met with another friend, the Welsh artist Sarah Rhys, an interdisciplinary artist living in Llansteffan, West Wales, who has been in touch with Heather and is hoping to work with her at some point in the future. Sarah is currently working on making a coracle, the small, round, lightweight boats that were a traditional means of water transport in Wales. I first met Sarah when she came as a Masters placement student to PLaCE, a little Research Centre I was then running at UWE, Bristol. A Centre that, despite its short life, has somehow managed to generate a considerable positive legacy. (After UWE closed PLaCE, Prof Mary Modeen at the University of Dundee and I arranged to maintain its spirit by setting up PLaCE International. Work at the Centre also led, in no small part through the efforts of another PLaCE student, Sue Adams, to the creation of a group called SpacePlacePractice, to which Sarah, Heather, Owain and myself belong). Like many of the students linked with the Centre, Sarah was interested in working as an artist but across a number of different disciplines and approaches. In her case, her focus was on different aspects of her Welsh identity as these linked into a range of environmental concerns.

Not everyone sees the linking of the arts and environmental concerns as positive. Indeed, in some quarters that link is seen as another example of the arts as parasitic or as a placebo for facing up to reality under capitalism. Given the often fairly tenuous nature of the relationship between aesthetic and activist concerns, it’s all too easy for activists to make blanket generalisations like George Monbiot’s claim that:

One of the greatest threats to life on Earth

is poetry.

I found this quotation recently in Caroline Lucas’ Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story (2024), where it seems an odd inclusion in a book that frequently refers admiringly (and, if the index is correct, at least twelve times) to the work of the poet John Clare.

I’m no longer interested in engaging with these kinds of deliberately polemic generalisations but, to anyone who feels Monbiot may have a point – and as always there is a grain of truth in what I think his provocation is trying to say – I would highly recommend the chapter Scapeland in Rebecca Solnit’s As Eve Said To The Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art (2001). Solnit is every bit as engaged in radical thinking, about the environment and many other urgent aspects of contemporary life, but is a far more nuanced and thoughtful writer. The chapter contains a long discussion of why, to quote her, “the Left would like to deny beauty as a motivating force altogether, to deny the power of form and embrace content alone – as though the two were separable’. I think Solnit’s understanding of the role of beauty puts its finger on the fear that is the real reason for Monbiot’s claim about poetry.

Solnit’s argument is too rich (and too long) to paraphrase here, but it is very well worth hunting out, regardless of whether you disagree with Mobiot or not. I would suggest it is also central to understanding the value of the work that Heather Green, Sarah Rhys, and many others are doing and, as such, well worth taking to heart.

Postscript

As I’ve written in this blog before, my friend Lindsey Colbourne once said to me that there is no such thing as a coincidence. Having finished this post and eaten dinner with my wife and daughter, I turned to the Culture page of the Guardian Newspaper on my wife’s laptop. It contains an article by Clare Longrigg about the Italian poet Maria Grazia Calandone’s quest to discover why her mother first abandoned her and then killed herself. I refer to it here as a reminder that, whatever we may think about poetry, we should not divorce its making from the lives of those who make it. As Longrigg notes, Calandone: ‘gives workshops in schools and prisons. She is a believer in the redemptive power of poetry. One of her volumes tells the stories of missing persons. Others, of Hiroshima, 9/11, Babi Yar’. In short, poets and poems may do and be many things. (Perhaps even sometimes and in some respects a great threat to life on Earth). But one of the great, and perhaps redemptive, qualities of any good poem is that, in the poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub’s words, it is always among other things an acknowledgement of its own ‘binding inadequacy’ and is therefore ‘close to to life’. (From the final chapter of Holub’s The Dimension of the Present Moment and other essays (1990).

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