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Hello and welcome to this week's newletter.
After weeks and weeks of relentless heat and almost no rain, with the ground hardened, gardens and fields parched and dry, crops lost and fires that have broken out across the country, it has been difficult to experience this simply as a long hot summer, when the signs of a changing climate are impossible to ignore.
The rain this week has brought real relief, but also a sharper awareness of how badly it was needed. There has been a heightened pleasure in its return: with the smell rising from dry pavements, leaves shining again, and the sense that plants and animals everywhere are taking a deep draught and breathing a sigh of relief.
The anxiety does not disappear with the first downpour, and a few days of rain cannot repair everything that has been lost. But we can still pause to welcome it, listen to it and notice what begins to revive.
There is something deeply comforting about hearing rain outside when you are sheltered indoors. It draws the world a little closer, softens its edges and gives us permission to be still, welcome the rain and listen to it for a while. I, for one, have enjoyed how lovely it is to wear socks again.
St Kilda’s Wren
I thought you said ‘rain’. You said wren,
small haunter of bog and lichen,
loud as gulls’ laughter, fierce as men.
Let me guess. Who was St Kilda?
Housewife? Healer? Abbey builder?
Or a man? The rain blows wilder,
on to the railway bank. The bird
flits down, swollen, small brown word.
The male, who wove each nest, is heard
shrilled, triumphant, darts up when
other birds shrink from storm or fen,
shouts to the saintless. Rain, wren, wren.
Alison Brackenbury
From Then (Carcanet, 2013)
and included in our Poetry Prescription: Wild Remedy
We also love Praise the Rain by Joy Harjo and you can read it here.
The Book of Bogs
This welcome rain also leads us beautifully towards bogs: those strange, saturated landscapes of moss, mist, hidden depths and extraordinary life. Bogs depend upon water. Their rain-fed, saturated ground allows peat to form, holds vast quantities of carbon and sustains rare plants and wildlife. When bogs dry out, that stored carbon begins to escape and the peat becomes dangerously vulnerable to fire. Rain is not simply welcome there. It is what keeps the whole landscape alive.
Bog is … secret, self contained, hidden pathways, a veil between worlds, wet feet, sunshine sparkle, black brown deep, haggs and gulley sides, shadows in the mist, feet sucking, boot snatching, hair cap moss, pixie cap lichen, preserver of the sacred, crowberry, cotton grass, deergrass, butter and bodies, broken swords, black water, balancing on tufts of grass, between here and there, yellow green orange crimson, sundews, curlews, greenshanks, a portal to the underworld, between now and then. Bog can hold its weight in tears.
from The Book of Bogs
Edited by Anna Chilvers and Clare Shaw, The Book of Bogs brings together original poetry and essays from more than forty writers, including Robert Macfarlane, Amy Liptrot, Patti Smith, Horatio Clare, Alys Fowler, Guy Shrubsole, Kim Moore and Pascale Petit.
The book began as a community response to plans for a large wind farm on Walshaw Moor in West Yorkshire, an important blanket peat bog and breeding ground for curlews, lapwings and golden plovers. It has since grown into a wider celebration and defence of bogs and peatlands, combining natural history, archaeology, culture, myth and adventure.
Around 80 per cent of Britain’s bogs and peatlands have been drained, stripped or irreversibly damaged over the past two centuries. Yet they remain rich in biodiversity, hold immense quantities of carbon and play a vital role in protecting us from the extremes of climate change.
We’ll be celebrating The Book of Bogs at the Poetry Pharmacy with both editors Clare Shaw and Anna Chilvers, maybe with guest readings from some of the contributors in our Poetry Pharmacy in York on Monday, September 28th.
Blending science and poetry, folklore and ecology, they will explore their vital role in carbon sequestration; the habitat they offer for astonishing life forms and red-listed species; and the role that literature can play in protecting these threatened ecosystems.
* All proceeds from ticket sales go to the 'Stronger Together to Stop Calderdale Windfarm" campaign
Find out more and book tickets →
Discover The Book of Bogs →
For now, we prescribe opening a window, listening carefully and letting the rain do its work.
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