Description

In the age of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion, Peter Street once more takes his place as veritable poet of the trees and flowers, giving them radical voice at this time of climate emergency. Melting ice-caps merge with the iceberg sensibility of Hemingway in Street’s economical style, a strange meeting of ee cummings, W.H. Davies and Edward Lear. In these humorous, polemical and imaginative poems we are privy to jingoistic exchanges in a Parliament of Flowers, and the covert operations of plotting beetles. Street’s gift for personifying flora and insecta is no mere accident, it’s cultivated from an arborist’s sensibility, and beneath its whimsical surface is something deeply empathic, polemical and subversive. In Earth Talk the earth fights back against the aggregate damage done to it by the human animal, and Street gives us unique insight into the bud and bug agitators of his native Wigan.