The Coleridge Lectures: Poetry, the land and nature

17 February 2015, 6.00 PM

Kathleen Jamie

Reception Room, Wills Memorial Building

Romanticism looked at nature and the natural world in new ways and embraced a sense of place. Kathleen Jamie – a nature poet who has also covered Scotland’s independent spirit – asks how human beings can live the right relationship with the natural world. Her poetry and her books of essays, Sightlines and Findings, have been at the centre of the revival of nature writing in recent years. Finding nature in the tiny cracks of daily life, as well as Orkney in midwinter and 21st-century flotsam on a shoreline in the Hebrides, Jamie helps us all renegotiate our relationship with the natural world. She will read from her work, and talk about this relationship.

This lecture is part of a new annual series inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s radical lectures in Bristol in 1795. The 2015 series is run in association with Bristol Festival of Ideas, the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol and Bristol 2015. It is part of The Romantic Poets and Bristol programme, which celebrates the life of Thomas Chatterton, Hannah More, Willam Wordsworth, Coleridge and others in the city, and Bristol as the place where Romanticism was born with the first publication of the Lyrical Ballads. The programme focuses especially on nature and the emotions, place and the environment, and also looks at Bristol as a city for science, philosophy, ideas and political debate at the time of Coleridge and today. The 2015 theme is Radical Green. Future themes are: Utopias (2016); Revolution (2017) and Peace (2018).

Booking

This event is free to attend and open to all, but booking is required. Click on the booking link HERE. Please note booking opens 6 January 2015.

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