‘Envoys of a living storm’: Reading and Writing Eco-Poems

Spinning off from Osip Mandelstam’s evocative description of plants, this short course is an immersion in contemporary eco-poetry across four themes: Plants and Trees; Air and Fire; Water and Ice; and Animals, Birds, Insects.

We’ll spend the first hour of each class in close reading and discussion of published eco-poems on our theme for that week.

During the second hour, we’ll workshop your own poems.

Optional prompts will be provided at the end of each session to help you generate writing for subsequent weeks.

All welcome!

About the Tutor

Emma Must is a poet living in Belfast. She has more than a decade’s experience of facilitating creative writing workshops. Formerly a full-time environmental campaigner, in 2021 she completed a PhD in English (Creative Writing) at Queen’s University Belfast, focusing on ecopoetry.

Emma’s poem ‘Toll’ won the Environmental Defenders Prize at the 2019 Ginkgo Awards. Her debut poetry collection, The Ballad of Yellow Wednesday (Valley Press, 2022), was longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2023 and Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes.