This week the Dual Poetry Podcast is focusing on nature poems. In the shadow of the climate emergency poems about the natural world take on a new significance, so during the second week of the 2021 COP 26 conference in Glasgow, we consider now contemporary poets are taking on and reshaping the traditional subject of nature.
Setting aside red roses, summer flowers, floral metaphors about love or odes to the glories of the countryside, rather we are looking to nature as a site of political encounter.
So on this weeks podcast our poems in Turkish, Somali and Chinese are offered in that spirit, as a call to encounter nature as a radical alternative where the vibrancy and resiliency of nature with its cycles of regrowth and complex balancing of interwoven diverse systems offer an alternative to a destructive capitalistic model of endless growth driving towards an unsupportable monoculture.
You will hear I know the unspoken by Bejan Matur translated from the Turkish by Canan Marasligil with Jen Hadfield, Our land by Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf, translated by Said Jama Hussein
Maxamed Xasan ‘Alto’ with Clare Pollard and Empty Town by Yu Yoyo, translated by Dave Haysom with AK Blakemore.
You can read Leo Boix blog Diana Bellessi: Ecological Subjectivity and the Poetics of Biodiversity on the PTC website. In fact, you can read it in English or Spanish.
