Certain Weather

Poet in the City is an exciting and innovative venture philanthropy charity committed to attracting new audiences to poetry, making new connections for poetry, and raising money to support poetry education, in particular the placing of poets in schools.

BLDGBLOG alerts me to the fact that, in partnership with Poet in the City, Lloyds have commissioned new poetry by Patience Agbabi, John Burnside and Matthew Hollis on the subject of climate change. It was Burnside’s name that caught my eye, I am a great admirer of his prose but I’ve never actually read his poetry. Here is an excerpt from ‘The Afterlife Of Animals’:

and, far in the life to come,
through quicklime, or ice,

we’ll either forget,
or remember without knowing why,

the songs of all the birds that ever
nested in these walls: the shifting

dialects of mistle-thrush and wren,
the sparrows in the hedge, the herring gulls,

and out along the fence, the bright ascent
of skylarks, faded now

to static, in a tuft
of scalded grass

It is apparently National Poetry Month in America at the moment so maybe I will take this as an opportunity to read a bit more. Although I frequently say this with very little outcome.

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