Environmental Poet of the Year

Winner

Ben Verinder, for How to Save a River

2nd

Rachel Bower, for Colour and Wing

3^rd 

Max Wallis, for Love's Wild Departing

Winner

Ben Verinder, for How to Save a River

Our winner this year showed vast creativity, great play and skilled control in How to Save a River. The uncertainty of place and time in this collection, full as it is of constant movement - alongside the straightforward stoppings of grief found in Signs of life, River deep, mountain high and The current - felt a fitting tribute to the crossovers between world and individual which we all navigate.

These are moving and surprising poems. They lament the degradation of river

habitats whilst elegising, too, the loss of a parent. We visit a fire in Cyprus, becks and

rivers in the Lake District and the US. Animals of water swim through much of the

pamphlet: eels, smolts, efts, crayfish, the salamander. Among this burgeoning life, the

strange face of loss is never far from sight. This means that the poems achieve a lovely,

multifaceted evocation of human interactions with the life of water, an element from

which, finally, strength, comfort and no small degree of hope are drawn.

The title poem exemplifies all this, setting the life of a woman, six- or seven-years-old at the beginning of the poem but glimpsed again after seventy years, remembering the larvae of crested newts:

keel-tailed, feathery
and so lucid she could watch their bodies working

within them, the daphnia packed
into the gut, as they gushed into efts –

a word you’ll think translucent.

There’s a beautifully delicate translucency to the wide-ranging and powerfully arranged poems of this pamphlet. Without having to moralise or even raise their voice, these

memorable poems make themselves heard.

2nd

Rachel Bower, Colour and Wing

This collection of poems describes, evokes and celebrates insect life with unusual focus and the deployment of rich linguistic resources. The loss of habitat, chemical depredations, wildfires and the encroachment of light into the nighttime world of moths are the ecological crises touched on by the poems, but an electrified sense of attentive wonder for the overlooked, small and uncelebrated infuses the work:

This is the chirping, harp and sawing hour,

heady with honeysuckle lust,

high scent of jasmine

but this beetle hunts only

wormwood,

brassy and silent…

(‘Wormwood moonshiner (Amara fusca)’)

The particular delicacy and attention that only a loving eye can lend its subject abounds in this collection, which kept us coming back and back. Under such close and sustained appreciation nothing can be said to be unremarkable, leaving the portentous Species Count and spiricle / future all the more darkly threatening. Much like immersing yourself in the natural world, with every re-reading these poems offer more to see, with some lines reaching near perfect in their quiet truth.

3^rd 

Max Wallis, Love's Wild Departing

This collection is focused around a love affair, and the end of that affair. What is recalled about this affair are moments of tenderness that are extended outwards to the non-human world – to lobsters, trees, tomatoes, blackberries, elephants. What rings throughout the collection is a powerful sense of the natural world seen, shared and loved. The poems are beautifully straightforward and plainspoken:

I watch from Anna’s room

looking up to Cassiopeia

waiting for the meteors.

But there is a massive lamppost

in the way…

(‘False Perseids’)

But individual poems often rise to instances of epigrammatic fluency and force:

And now I come to think of it,

what is disaster but something

we have to sail,

with someone safe to guide us?

(‘Flood’)

With vulnerability and humour by turns, this collection does a fantastic job of honouring us all in the unavoidable business of risking to know one another. That the poet manages to do so with such quick and clear energy lends a pleasing sense of the unstoppable to the intimate. Though as with all entries the climate crisis looms unavoidably in a backdrop of mutual ongoing concern, this collection in its directness felt a welcome invitation to live. Just lovely.