Rose Brookfield

Your verse novel ICE imagines a dystopian future in which the ice caps have melted causing a new ice age in Europe. Humans survive in underground cities. Why did you choose the verse novel form to tell this story?

I am a great admirer of the Swedish poet Harry Martinson, especially his verse epic Aniara. Published in 1956 during the Cold War, it is set in a near-future when Earth has been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. Survivors are transported on giant spaceships to colonies on Mars and Venus, but one, Aniara, is knocked off course. Its eight thousand occupants become a microcosm for humanity, marooned in deep space, irreparably cut off from the Earth which made them and which they thoughtlessly destroyed. Set in the future, Aniara is a warning to the present.

It occurred to me that I could use Martinson’s structure to express my own concerns about the way we are plundering the Earth. In Aniara he uses a wide variety of verse forms including rhymed quatrains. This wouldn’t have worked for me, and I decided on a version of the free-verse long line, as used by Robinson Jeffers in his narrative poems.

Aniara has 103 cantos. I knew mine would have 100. I knew the setting would be four underground cities which, humans being humans, were at war with one another. But I did not know who the characters were or what the plot was. It was as if I followed a thread into a world that already existed and all I had to do was describe what I saw.

A recurring trait of the future you imagine is the lack of colour. While watching a documentary of the ‘last forest’ the speaker attests ‘we hate the colour green’ and, yet they paint the walls with all the ‘colours we have been denied/here underground’. Do you think we have already lost appreciation for the beauty of the natural world?

I would make a distinction between the natural world and the countryside. In Britain, what we have left, for the most part, is countryside—nature tamed by human activity. The Black Mountains in South Wales, where I grew up, for example, might seem ‘wild’, but their ecology has been profoundly altered and diminished by intensive sheep farming.

A majority of people treat the countryside as a playground, a place for mountain biking, climbing, speed boating, etc. Even walkers rarely know the names of the birds, insects, flowers they encounter. So yes, I would say people are losing that appreciation.

Yet and still, there is a residual need for what is left of natural beauty. Parks are essential breathing spaces in the densest of cities. In any urban area, you will see pot plants in many windows, a half-conscious expression of the need for the living colour green.

In your work you often depict humans as brutish and parasitic creatures who have looted the earth of its resources. Do you have any hope for future generations becoming stewards of the earth?

My generation has failed miserably in this, but there are many young people now who are highly aware and active in promoting the kind of stewardship you mention. They are the best of us.

Speaking of humanity as a whole, however, there is a problem. The human brain is in many ways unique, but it evolved some 200,000 years ago when Homo sapiens was a bipedal mammal with an ecological niche in East and Southern Africa. Our brains were adapted to that niche and allowed us to thrive. Our inventiveness enabled us to spread around the globe in a mere 50,000 years, until now we dominate all habitable environments. Our intelligence unlocked Pandora’s Box and we cannot stop inventing at an ever-increasing speed. For the rest, however, our brains have not evolved. We lack the organisational capacity and moral selflessness to act together on the global scale necessary if we are to overcome the multiple crises we have initiated.

This problem is reflected in the increasing popularity of right-wing governments around the world, led by chancers and liars like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, and dictators such as Putin, Erdogan and Orbán, who appeal to short-term self-interest which recklessly ignores the catastrophic environment we are facing. (Labour’s recent landslide victory in the general election is interesting. Is it an anomaly, or the first sign of a sea change in global politics? How green, in any case, are its credentials?)

There is one other problem, the elephant in the room, which is the simple fact that there are too many of us—eight billion and counting—making too many demands on the Earth’s resources.

How important do you think the role of memory is in ecological writing? Is it the duty of current writers to record the natural world so that future generations can understand what it is they have lost?

I would say this is the function of ecologists and biologists. Future generations will discover what they have lost from the films and writings of naturalists like David Attenborough, and by leafing through books like the nine-volume Handbook of the Birds of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

In a lecture you gave recently you spoke about the idea that every generation has a cause. You felt that while contemporary writers might feel a pressure to make climate change their cause, it would be more productive to engage with hands-on activism rather than forced writing. Do you think that writing about climate change is a futile act?

There is no sign that we will be able to stabilise, let alone reverse, the current trend of global warming, nor prevent the mass extinction of species, the sixth in the history of multicellular life, which humans have initiated. Nonetheless, the attempt must be made because humans cannot live without hope.

For me personally, I believe in the importance of witnessing, in the Protestant sense. We are likely to be swept away in the catastrophic events that are to come, but someone has to be a witness, has to stand up for truth. Writers are well placed to do this. It may be futile, but it is also necessary.

Your poetry sets you apart from a lot of nature writers because you write about nature realistically rather than solely romantically. Your poem’s ‘Roadkill’, ‘To the Editor’ and ‘What the Poets are Up To’ serves as examples of this. In ‘Roadkill’ you heighten the image, ‘burst bodies on the roads/tubes of grey for intestines squeezed out fast’, by recalling Francis Bacon’s violent paintings, ‘The Screaming Pope’ and ‘Man in Blue’. Do you think there is a danger in romanticising the natural world?

In Britain what we think of as the natural world is really nature tamed by human activity, as I said earlier. Left alone in a tropical rainforest, few of us would last a week. Even here, if you look closely—at wasps, for instance, that lay their eggs in caterpillars as a living larder—you have to acknowledge that while it may be beautiful, nature is also ruthless and from a human perspective horrific. If we romanticise the natural world, it is because we don’t look at it in sufficient detail.   

Do you think we need to start writing nature as it is, rather than what it has been or what we might wish it to be?

Definitely. And there are, of course, poets who have done this. Robinson Jeffers comes to mind, and more recently Ted Hughes. In poems like ‘Thrushes’, ‘Hawk Roosting’ and ‘Thistles’, Hughes looks at nature with a post-Darwinian eye and sees what is there.

Religion is a recurring them in your poetry. What role do you think religion has played in the Anthropocene?

That is a difficult question! The Book of Genesis is interesting because it tries to explain human uniqueness through the myth of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The fruit of the Tree represents the dawn of human consciousness, which brought with it a sense of morality, of right and wrong, which appears to be unique to humans. Cats can seem cruel when they toy with a mouse, but it is an instinctive act common to all cats. They are not cruel because they have no moral sensibility. When not taken literally, Genesis is a profound insight into what makes us human.

As to religion in the Anthropocene, it can be a means of promoting awareness of our responsibility toward the Earth. Equally, it contributes to our destructive tendency in its incitement to sectarian hatred and violence.

What does your ‘eureka’ moment when you get the idea to write a poem feel and look like?

I think poetry is like fly fishing. You cast your line across the placid surface of a lake and wait. Most days nothing happens and you go away and do something else. Then suddenly there is a bite, and if you are lucky, the fish of a poem is hauled into the light. That is the moment you have been waiting for, and when the poem is down on the page, if it is any good, it is something quite apart from yourself—something you never could have written with the conscious mind.

What role does your Welsh identity play in your writing?

In Welsh there is a concept, ‘y milltir sgwâr’, the square mile, where you were brought up, which made you, and to which you will always belong. That square mile for me is the Usk Valley and the foothills of the Black Mountains surrounding Abergavenny in Monmouthshire where I was born. I have not lived there for many years, but all my writing is ultimately derived from my experience of growing up there.

If you were an animal, what do you think you would be? 

A goldfinch. They are such beautiful, vivacious, restless little birds. Seed eaters, who harm nobody. (But really, I am a cat.)

Who, if anyone, do you write for?

When you are writing you are immersed in the moment. All that matters is the poem. You can’t even say you are writing for yourself. You write because what is within you demands to be released in words. Only afterwards do you wonder whether anyone will read it.

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John Barnie is a Welsh poet, essayist, and blues musician from Abergavenny, Monmouthshire. He taught for a number of years at Copenhagen University before returning to Wales to work as an editor at Planet. Barnie has published over twenty collections of poems and essays, many of which seek to examine our relationship with the natural world. In 2016 Barnie was poet-in-residence at Oxford’s Natural History Museum. His collection, King of Ashes, won the Welsh Arts Prize for literature. Barnie’s most recent verse novel, ICE, was published in 2024. 

Rose Brookfield is writer and bookseller based in London. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh in 2021, with a degree in English Literature, she spent two years working on regenerative farms in Europe, the UK and Australia. She founded the podcast, Farming for the Future, which aims to act as career advice for people who might be interested in entering the farming industry but don’t know where to start. She is a current member of the Oxford Creative Writing MSt. She has written forELAND and The Sustainable Food Trust.