Events & Courses

Timed to coincide with National Poetry Day and Earth Science Week, this one day event included talks, discussion, art installations and a reading by contemporary poets.

The talks were on a variety of themes and writers, including Thomas Hardy and the Dorset Coast, Robert Burns, Poetry and Climate Change, the Lake District, Poetry and the Anthropocene and Poetry Sculptures.

Follow the links below for video and audio recordings of all of the days talks, copies of most of the poems read at the event, a slideshow of haiku lino-cut prints and links to poems.

Watch the talks online

• The geology of the imagination: Wallace Stevens' 'The Rock'   -  Francis Gilbert
• Robert Burns, James Hutton and the red, red rose  -  Colin Will
• Thomas Hardy and the Jurassic Coast  -  Rebecca Welshman
• Norman Nicholson: poet of the Lake District  -  Eric Robinson
• The Stone Library  -  Alyson Hallett
• The Lie of the Land: a year in Grasmere  -  Helen Mort
• Three Poems about Ice: Poetry and Climate Change  -  Matthew Griffiths
• Poetry and the Anthropocene  -  Jan Zalasiewicz
• The Ground of Geo-Poetics  -  Gordon Peters
• Milton, Tennyson - then who?  -  Bryan Lovell

Read the poems

• 'Siccar Point' by Colin Will
• 'Field Notebook' by Barbara Cumbers 
• 'Borrowdale' by Barbara Cumbers 
• 'Dave was the very model of a student of geology' by Stuart Harker 
• 'A Field Season on the Zambian Plateau' by Alexander Smith 
• 'Full Moon at Little White Alice' by Victoria Field 
• 'Drifting Impressions' by Brian Rosen 
• 'Where Giants Lay Buried' by Lewis Entwistle 
• 'Revelations' by Mark Cooper 
• 'Inheritance' by Mark Cooper 
• 'The Land League' by Michael McKimm 
• 'Conversation with a Pebble' by Alyson Hallett 
• 'Hartland Quay Cliffs' by Alyson Hallett 
• 'Rope' by Helen Mort 

A poem by Peter Redgrove