Simon Armitage: Poet laureate on 'life-changing' visit to the Arctic
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-67098028
By Ian Youngs
Entertainment & arts reporter
After a "life-changing" visit to the Arctic, poet laureate Simon Armitage says poets can convey what's happening with climate change in a way that scientists and journalists can't.
A polar bear is traipsing over a receding glacier that now resembles a "rotting carcass of ice", wearing a fur coat that's "too heavy, too baggy, too hot since the sun got stuck in the sky".
In Armitage's poem Polar Bear, the writer goes on to imagine the animal he spotted on his visit being destined to roam in ever narrower circles in search of scarcer food, until all it can do is reach up for the North Star and "cling by a single claw".
In another work, Armitage describes his boat drifting through the remains of an "ancient empire of snow" that appears to have been smashed to ruins, leaving the "marbled wreckage" of imagined icy temples, palaces and tombs.
A third poem is inspired by a conversation with a scientist who is researching seabirds whose stomachs contain pieces of plastic from around the world.
"In the small intestine/of the little auk/we found Mexico City, Manila, Shanghai, New York."
As well as his poems, Armitage has made a BBC Radio 4 series about the trip. In the first episode, he says poets have had their "money's worth when it comes to nature" by using it as inspiration for centuries, and it's "time for poetry to pay something back".
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