What is the role of poetry and the poet in a climate and biodiversity crisis?
Robert Burns is celebrated for his profound understanding and appreciation of nature. His evocative poems captured the essence of the natural world in his time, depicting its beauty, power, and the deep connection it shares with humanity. In 2025 the natural world is in a perilous state, and we need many perspectives. What can language do?
On the heels of Burns Night, Dumfries & Galloway Arts Festival and D&G Climate Hub in collaboration with Bakehouse Community Arts welcome two contemporary performance poets to Galloway. Tawona Sitholé and Genevieve Carver will share their work and discuss with us their take on this eternal connection in the present: the fragile state we are living through, how we can respond, how we might be in best service of nature during a climate crisis. These events will blend performance and conversation. This is the second event in the series. The first takes place on 28th January, 6.30 – 8.30 pm with poet, playwright, and short story author Tawona Sitholé at the Feast Café, Kirkcudbright. Keep an eye on dgartsfestival.org.uk/events for details.
On Saturday 8th February, 2.00 – 4.00pm, we welcome Genevieve Carver, a writer and poet with special interests in nature writing and interdisciplinary collaboration. Her pamphlet Landsick (Broken Sleep Books 2023) began to explore themes of connectivity and discord between humans and the natural world, and her most recent book, Birds / Humans / Machines / Dolphins (Guillemot Press 2024) is the result of a residency with the University of Aberdeen writing in response to ecological field research studying dolphin populations in the Moray Firth, and fulmars in Orkney.
Watch: genevievecarver.com/videos
Book tickets here: TicketSource.
The poems integrate poetic and scientific processes, data about animal life histories and first-hand encounters with ecological fieldwork, giving voice to the non-human in surprising and original ways. In addition to the text, Genevieve collaborated with composer Lucie Treacher to create the EP Hydrophonica, blending spoken word and music with underwater field recordings of bottlenose dolphins. She won the Moth Nature Writing Prize for this work, of which judge Max Porter said:
"It’s such an interesting and surprising hybrid, which manages to be deeply funny and very sad at the same time, an unusual feat in both science writing and poetry.”
Genevieve is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Aberdeen.