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 & D&G Climate Hub in collaboration with Bakehouse Community Arts welcome two contemporary performance poets to Galloway. Tawona Sithole 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.
On 28th January, 6.30 – 8.30pm) poet, playwright, and short story author Tawona Sitholé will light up the room at Feast Café, Kirkcudbright. Better known as Ganyamatope (his ancestral family name), his upbringing in a family of storytellers, poets and musicians in Zimbabwe brings a unique perspective to the human condition and our relationship to land and resources. He will draw on pasichigaré – a Zimbabwean tradition that sees nature as a connected family, of which humans are a part along with rivers, trees, animals, rocks…
Tawona’s expansive poetry collection Something Like Sugarbread (Speculative Books 2018) explores colonial legacies, the impact of extractive capitalism on Africa and strikingly renders the natural world animate and alive.
His Shona heritage inspires him to make connections with others through creativity-based learning, and he uses both Shona and Ndau languages in his work. He is currently UNESCO artist-in-residence at the University of Glasgow and a workshop leader with Scottish Youth Theatre.
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.
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.”