Robyn Bolam’s evocative poems in Listening to the Future speak through birdsong, lightning and rain, the rumble of a landslip, sounds of the sea, even humming giraffes – about our relationships with our planet, its creatures and each other.
They connect a Dorset cottage with Middle East conflict, a New Forest saltmarsh with Ukraine and a Turkey-Syria earthquake, an exultation of skylarks with lost Amazonian children, and a teenager’s Tyneside with the moon landings. They ask: to whom, or what should we be listening – and how, keeping love at the heart of everything, can we, as Voltaire wrote, ‘give ourselves the gift of living well’?
Listening to the Future celebrates passions, perseverance and the endeavours of those who dare to look ahead, from Anne Boleyn, Gilbert White, T. E. Lawrence and the first swallow, to artists, explorers, pioneers and survivors everywhere.
Listening to the Future is Robyn Bolam’s fifth poetry collection and her first since Hyem (2017). Her earlier work is available in New Wings: Poems 1977-2007 (2007), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Praise for Robyn Bolam's poetry:
'Robyn Bolam’s Hyem is a carefully constructed collection of poems that are scrupulously crafted and rooted in authentic experience. The images are well observed and to the point, yet frequently resonate beyond the circumstances that have inspired them. It’s a collection that allows you to feel and makes you think. It is one also to which you can return with renewed pleasure.' - David Cooke, The High Window
‘There is calm acceptance of mystery; there is precise observation… and carefully sustained metaphor…and in all of this, there is the poet's trust in her own perceptions, which are at once worldly and otherworldly.’ – Lavinia Greenlaw & Alan Jenkins, PBS Bulletin, on New Wings
‘The new poems pulse with determined affirmation and renewal… humour and lush detail merge with…poems of unusual intelligence and historical sensitivity.’ – Todd Swift, Poetry Review, on New Wings
‘Compelling and accomplished...a poet of unusual talent.’ – Bernard O’Donoghue, Times Literary Supplement, on The Peepshow Girl
Ireland & EU: Click here to order from Books Upstairs in Dublin
USA: Click here to order from Indiebound or Bookshop.org
