Generally when you think of British nature poetry you imagine some young romantic white Englishman wandering, addressing his rhymed epistles to the fieldmice in the hedgerows, his heart stirring for the starlings and for the leaping lambkins.
Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority explodes the whiteness and the rhymed epistles and maybe those leaping lambkins as well. Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf’s 2025 anthology is dedicated to the proposition “that nature matters everywhere and for everyone and everything.” That means, in the UK context, that nature isn’t just flowering in those bowers, but is poking up with the weeds in the urban centers and swaying, with the seagulls on the deck between here and there.
Arshi and McCarthy are constructing a counter canon to the Wordsworths and Keatses and Hopkinses, highlighting non-white, diaspora, and post-colonial communities in or around the UK in the last 50 or so years, concentrating especially on the 21st century. In four sections dedicated to earth, air, water, and fire, forbearers like Derek Wolcott, A.K. Ramanujan, E.A. Markham, Kamau Brathwaite and Linton Kwesi Johnson stride and soar next to currently working contributors like Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Mary Jean Chan, Pascale Petit—and the editors.
Some of those in the volume assert their own place in the traditional nature poetry tradition. For instance, Benjamin Zephaniah (1958-2023) begins his delightfully low-key “Nature Trail” by itemizing the hedgehogs, frogs, snails and woodlice in his garden. He concludes:
My garden is a lively place
There’s always something happening,
There’s this constant search for food
And then there’s all that flowering,
When you have a garden
You will never be alone
And I believe we all deserve
A garden of our own.
The “all” who deserve a garden includes everyone reading, not least young people since this could be a children’s poem. But, given the fact that Zephaniah’s work often discusses racism and his Jamaican heritage, the call for gardens for all also reads as a firm demand that people like Zephaniah be allowed access to a good life which includes green spaces, as well as access to the tradition of nature poetry. Zephaniah subtly suggests that the excluded have in many ways a stronger connection to that tradition (who after all understands best “the constant search for food”?) and that broadening the tradition allows for greater richness (“flowering”) for all.
Other poems in the collection are less interested in claiming their right to the old rhetorical traditions than creating different or parallel one. Guyanese-born poet and diplomat David Dabydeen (1955-) is represented by part of his long work Turner, in which nature, in the form of the ocean, is both inspiration and inseparable from the terrors of the Middle Passage. The poem opens with a bleak description of a kidnapped woman in the hold giving birth to a dead child.
The part-born, sometimes with its mother,
Tossed overboard. Such was my bounty
Delivered so unexpectedly that at first
I could not believe this miracle of fate,
This longed-for gift of motherhood.
What was deemed mere food for sharks will become
My fable. I named it Turner
As I have given fresh names to birds and fish
And humankind, all things living but unknown,
Dimly recalled, or dead.
The epic cadence evokes the connection between nature and creation, water and motherhood. The birth is sterile and bloody, and also contradictorily, generative—both for JMW Turner, whose famous painting of enslaved people thrown overboard is referenced and for Dabydeen, who’s writing about horror, subjugation, violence. Nature isn’t a balm and not an impersonal awesome force, but is instead turned into an active collaborator in atrocity. And yet, it’s still generative—birds and fish and trauma, are all born together from the same landscape that devours the dead with the sharks. We create like nature, Dabydeen suggests, but what we create is inseparable from our own nature, our own history, what we’ve done, and what’s been done to us.
Vidyan Ravinthiran’s poem “Autumn” connects these inside/outside approaches to nature poetry past. Ravinthiran references Keats’ poem of the same name. But where Keats’ ominously luxurious tribute to “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” accepts his own death as part of an eternal cycling “soft-dying day,” Ravinthiran’s can’t easily settle in any one place, or any one fate.
The fallen yellow leaves now oftener
flare red. Embers. Blown-up chilli-flakes.
The burning of the library at Jaffna.
Foreign dead about to break
the spell of here and now. Phantasms steal
into the peaceful lives we seem to have earned,
telling tales about what happened
to them, not us, and in a tongue I never learned.
This is my garden, my spade of blood meal
and from our kitchen the time-travelling smell
of chicken curry floats to Walden Pond.
Autumn’s changing leaves point, not to eternal rounds of death and rebirth, but to a particular act of violence—the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in Ravinthiran’s home of Sri Lankan by a government mob in 1981. The conflagration incinerates Ravinthiran’s roots in home and in books, and the poem wanders off to a peaceful life, a new tongue, a Harvard post-Walden Pond, where Thoreau went to commune with a nature whose (supposed) rootedness only underlines the extent to which Ravinthiran’s chicken curry wafts in from somewhere else.
The poem closes with Ravinthiran contemplating the destruction of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and his own distance from it, and from nature:
Our autumn clouds are a far-quarried rubble
to which the changing light does spicy things.
To sing, to fly, migrate, are curious verbs;
beauty, like happiness, frailly reliable,
has nothing to do with why there are wings,
why birds build nests and sing their songs,
or why barbed wire’s besotted with its barbs.
Keats’ equation of truth and beauty in his “Ode To A Grecian Urn” falls apart in the rubble left by the tsunami and in the migration of birds and poets, singing far from where they were, or are. The final strange lines present birds as irrevocably distant from human appreciation and then dead ends in barbed wire “besotted with its barbs.” That’s a semi-parodic nod to Keats’ romanticization of his death, and a vision of a natural world walled off in time and place by ideology, prejudice, presupposition.
It’s relevant that Sri Lanka, located near the equator, doesn’t have an autumn—Keats’ eternal cycle of truth is a provincial landscape; his comfortable sense of oneness with the natural world requires an illusory bracketing and universalizing of his own experience. Ravinthiran responds to and covets that beautiful placefulness, but he can’t really believe it. His memory and/or his identity “does spicy things” to the garden which is his and isn’t.
That sense of ownership and dispossession, of a world whose boundaries keep shifting, permeates Nature Matters. There are poems of environmental advocacy—like Karthinka Naïr’s “Women of Uttarakhand I Did Not Know Your Names,” a tree-shaped tribute to Indian Chipko forest conservation movement. But they exist in a framework in which nature’s never untouched and pristine, but always is an idea and a reality that people deploy to define here and there, belonging and power. Nature Matters looks at the earth, the air, and the water and sees more people and meaning there than an earlier tradition would admit in its more orderly flowerbeds.