Seeing the wood and the trees

The Cheltenham Poetry Society Awayday was blessed with amazing weather on Wednesday - and its participants were extremely well fed! Dumbleton Hall certainly proved a good venue with a pleasant conference room and excellent food. Seventeen of us spent the morning working firstly on poems about wooden objects and then on ones about the trees from which they came. That second session reminded me that a year or so ago I was writing a lot about myths and legends - woods and forests play a major role in so many of those of course, and I was prompted into thinking more about what I wrote then and how and what I could add to that collection.

Our afternoon session was led by Stuart Nunn and focused on landscape poetry. There were diverse opinions on the validity of a quote used that "We can no longer indulge in the simple pleasures of the 'retreat and return' approach to nature" (as perhaps exemplified in the Romantic poets). I'm all for realism in poetry; nature can most definitely be "red in tooth and claw" and, of course, the physical environment is always characterised more by change than stasis. The urban landscape - often raw or bleak - provides enormous food for thought and huge opportunities for poetry. But I'm firmly of the opinion that there's space for all sorts of poetic approaches to landscape, with so-called "radical landscape poetry" simply being part of a continuum. I believe that individual poets may quite legitimately choose any point on that continuum from which to write - but I'm well aware this is not a currently fashionable viewpoint to hold!

The idyllic landscape at Dumbleton