Poetry and Place

A story with a happy ending, brought to me by poetry:

I had the great good fortune to go on a family trip to England last year, with a stop in Wales. In a bookstore in Caernarvon I picked up a book of poetry, This Common Uncommon by Rae Howells. 

She's following in the footsteps of an earlier Welsh poet, John Clare, who wrote about the effects of the Enclosure Act. Howells' poems describe Clyne Common in loving detail, from the plants and creatures to the people fighting to save it from development. Wales has a national law protecting spaces that hold endangered species and they're trying to preserve their commons, but this one was owned by an English lord who wanted to develop it.

I read the book over the course of a few weeks, resisting the urge to find out what actually happened in the legal battle. I finished the book, read the beautiful last poem "Jays in Love", and promptly searched on "Clyne Commons legal battle."

They won! They saved the commons! Many, many people fought to save it and won.

It isn't that this book of poetry necessarily turned the tide. But it brought me so much joy to know that this place she observed so closely and described so beautifully is still there. The scrubby land the lord had offered up as "replacement value" is a perfectly good place to put houses, since housing is a real need. You can build houses without destroying irreplaceable habitat. And the people who live in those houses can enjoy and appreciate the commons that will still be there, living and breathing. 

Reading the first lines of that article moved me to tears. People loving a place and caring and fighting for it can and do make a real difference in the world.

This story of place has extra resonance for me because my maternal grandfather was of Welsh descent, although I have no idea which part of Wales his family originally came from. Welsh mythology has always appealed to me, and in college as a linguistics major I took a semester of Middle Welsh. Going to Wales meant riding on a train that announced stops first in Welsh, then in English, and hearing Welsh spoken as the primary language in the bookstore where I got this book and a new translation of the Mabinogion, the Welsh mythology I read as a child.

I want more poetry of place. If it's coupled with a victory for the planet, so much the better. Know of any?