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. The book celebrates passions, perseverance and the endeavours of those who dare to look ahead.

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.