PAUL EVANS: A POETIC SPIRIT
Words have the power to rewild our souls, says nature writer and broadcaster Paul Evans, editor of invigorating new collection Poetry Rebellion
Why have you created a collection of poetry “to rewild the spirit”?
I have been a writer, naturalist and conservationist all my life. I’m interested in rewilding as a cultural as well as an ecological concept and I’ve always thought literature was a way of connecting the soul to nature – that without a wilder human spirit we cannot hope for wilder ecosystems and address our crimes of ecocide.
How can poetry act as a form of rebellion?
Poetry can be a standing-up, an advocacy – it can confront and challenge, praise and condemn, as it has for thousands of years. More than ever we need poetry to bear witness and stand up to violence, prejudice, cruelty and wilful ignorance. Poetry is empowering and therefore dangerous.
What is ecophobia and how is it affecting us?
Ecophobia is the fear of nature’s answering violence – to protect ourselves and our beliefs we retaliate against a potentially hostile nature to control it. But we have gone too far, for us and for nature. We’re in the contradictory position of managing nature as a resource for us and fearful of its ability to wipe us out.
Your introduction was written at the start of the Covid pandemic. Does poetry have the power to console us in times of crisis?
The virus is an example of nature adapting to our actions and although poetry can console and provide solace from environmental grief, it has, powerfully, the ability to inspire action, to rebel against those forces ranged against nature and the human spirit.
This collection spans centuries and continents. Did you have to make some difficult exclusions?
It was an agonising process deciding what to include and what to cut out – such a privilege but I still don’t think I’ve got it right! I hope readers will see why some favourites are absent and some more obscure choices fit.
What is your favourite poem in the collection?
It changes all the time. It was Alan Ginsberg’s Sunflower Sutra that got me started but I’m very fond of John Clare, Mary Webb, Li Po, Basho and the new young radicals.
Did nature help you during the recent lockdowns?
I am lucky to live in a beautiful corner of Shropshire and have been writing about local nature for nearly 30 years as a Guardian Country Diarist. As a naturalist immersing myself in nature, not least in a year like we’ve just had, my writing is a kind of advocacy. It comes from a robin singing behind the rain, owls hooting from the wood, a hare’s tracks in the snow and the wind blowing fore and aft – small acts of resistance in the war against nature.