Reimagine our relationship with the natural world through the Welsh poetic tradition. In his new book Cynefin, Welsh author, ecologist and gardener, Carwyn Graves, mines the work of poets to offer fresh perspectives from themes of grief and loss mediated through snow and the cuckoo’s song, to ecological sensibilities in medieval poems and the generosity of the water that drives the water wheel.

At a time of biodiversity loss and climate grief, we need to reset our relationship with the natural world.  Cynefin helps us hear the voices of people down the centuries who have, through poetry, expressed a different way of connecting with the living world around us. 

In a thousand years of poetry we see the natural world portrayed not as a pristine realm but a human home; bittersweet as well as welcoming. Above all Carwyn invites us, through these poems, to encounter nature – in a bee, a flower, a lake or a field of sheep – not in the abstract but in all its sparkling reality.  (publisher’s website)

Event in English with some poetry spoken in Welsh

Carwyn Graves has expressed his love of apples – reflected in the bestselling Apples of Wales (2018) – which led to wider work on food and farming history, with Welsh Food Stories (2022) called by Radio 4 ‘the best food policy book of 2022’, in Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape  (2024) by identifying seven key elements of the Welsh landscape, such as the ffridd, or mountain pasture, and the rhos, or wild moorland we met some of the people who live, work and farm in them; now, with Cynefin, through poets who capture the spirit of the whole, Carwyn breathes gently, for their work goes straight to the heart, demonstrating a history of care, so providing our dreams with a solid basis for action.

We are so looking forward to this event, the culmination of our celebration of ‘The Green Month of May’