Poetry in the Woods: Poetry and place in the work of John Clare

Speakers: Jonathan Brockbank and Freya Sierhuis

Join us for an afternoon of poetry and music at the meadow of St Nicks Nature Reserve, where we’ll explore the life and work of the Romantic poet John Clare (1793-1864), viewed by many as the finest poet about nature and the natural world in the English language.

Hear Clare enthusiasts Jonathan Brockbank and Freya Sierhuis of the University of York read and respond to their chosen poems and listen to some of the tunes Clare loved to play on the fiddle. We’ll discuss the impact on Clare’s poetry of the enclosure movement, which fundamentally reshaped the English countryside, cutting him off from the beloved landscapes of his childhood, and contributing to the sense of precarity and loss that haunts many of his poems.

At the same time, we’ll explore how the poems celebrate the joys of rambling, seeing, listening and living through the senses. Clare, more than perhaps any other poet of his time, can be read as a writer who is ‘at home’ in nature, attuned to the rhythms of the seasons and of agricultural life and to the lives of countless other beings that make up the more-than-human world.

We’ll finish, poems in hand, with a stroll through the woodland areas of St Nicks, where the rangers will talk about the history of the site, the different forms of habitat creation that have taken place since its creation, and discuss some traditional techniques of woodland management that will provide an unexpected living link to the woodlands of Clare’s day.

Please meet at the Environment Centre. The event will take place at the Stone Circle (the meadow) but will move indoors in the case of bad weather.

Image credit: Lewis Outing/St Nicks

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