Jonathan Bate and Kathleen Jamie: Poetry and Landscape @ EIBF

 

The two writers here were each qualified to talk about poetry and landscape in a different way. The poet Kathleen Jamie is, of course, a very accomplished landscape poet (and a very accomplished lots-of-other-sorts-of-poet too), and Jonathan Bate, who is primarily a critic, has written extensively on poetry and landscape, as well as penning a biography of John Clare, the nineteenth-century English poet who wrote a large number of poems relating to nature and the natural world. This was a relaxed morning event, with coffee and pastries on offer, and so when Kathleen Jamie gave readings from poems in progress, it seemed very fitting in the circumstances. Bate then read from the works of several other landscape poets, including Clare, Ted Hughes and others, and a discussion followed about landscape and poetry. Jamie mentioned that she’d moved away from writing about landscape, but that it had crept back into her writing, while Bate mentioned several poets who he considered were great at writing about landscape – Alice Oswald’s long-form poem ‘Dart’ was given a couple of mentions, whilst Gary Snyder was slightly criticised for writing polemics about conservation that were too forced to work. Quietly contentious, but it didn’t disturb the atmosphere. This was an absorbing, but always relaxed, session. [Keir Hind]