David Farrier's books include Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils (2020) and Anthropocene Poetics (2019). Footprints won the Royal Society of Literature’s Giles St. Aubyn award and has been translated into nine languages. He is Professor of Literature and the Environment at the University of Edinburgh. 

"I think a poem is a wonderful device for challenging our sense of the world around us and how things are connected in particular. Whether it's through the patterning of sounds or the arrangement of line breaks, poems are always suggesting to us new and perhaps unconsidered ways in which seemingly unlike things can be drawn into a relationship with one another, perhaps have always been in a relationship that we haven't understood. In Anthropocene Poetics, I talk about the thick time of lyric poetry, how a poem can bring many different times and time scales together. A poem can help us to think about the planetary time alongside the time of a passing moment or time on a human scale, as if these things are totally at home together - which of course they are."

Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils

www.ed.ac.uk/profile/david-farrier

Anthropocene Poetics

www.oneplanetpodcast.org

www.creativeprocess.info