POETS OF CAMBRIDGE
Nature has extraordinary power to heal us
OUTDOOR VOICE Engaging with the climate crisis, Scale is as timely as it is beautiful
Spurred by the talent of her colleagues and Cambridge contemporaries, academic Mina Gorji rallied with other poets to found the Judith E Wilson Centre, today a staple of Cambridge’s poetry landscape. Mina’s intricate work is known for turning a magnifying glass on the natural world. This year’s collection, Scale , takes this approach even further, something she perhaps picked up from one of her favourite poets – and topic of academic interest – John Clare. “He’s a great noticer of the natural world,” explains Mina. After visiting the Institute of Astronomy on Madingley Road with fellow poet Bhanu Kapil, perusing the ancient star maps of the 16th and 17th centuries, Mina had a moment of revelation. “It was a winter’s morning and there were snowdrops on the ground. I remember thinking how extraordinary it was that, up in the sky, you have white spots of light – and down on the ground, snowdrops and frost are producing a kind of pattern, too.” That seed of an idea grew into Scale , a collection which deals with our relation to the natural world, temporality and immigration. “We don’t tend to think of the hippopotamus as a native animal in MINA GORJI
the UK. But, in fact, there were hippos just outside Cambridge in Barrington. I became quite interested in that question because I wasn’t born here, continuing from my first collection which explores things, humans, plants and creatures migrating across the world in different ways.” Confronted with the pandemic and an oncoming climate crisis, the resilience of living beings was another fascination of Mina’s. “It’s very strange to get your head around the idea that 1-2°C of climate change can make such a huge difference,” Mina says. “I was thinking about how the imagination has to work to understand the difference these tiny shifts of scale make.” Mina has been called an eco-poet, a description she feels is ‘about remembering our relation to other living things and the history of other living things, thinking about the human as part of something much bigger’. “The natural world has an extraordinary power to heal us,” Mina continues. “My mother, many years ago, was having nasty treatment for cancer. She would go into the park, and it made a huge difference for her to sit there in the shade of the oak trees.”
CAMBSEDITION.CO.UK OCTOBER 2022 31
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