The poet laureate, Simon Armitage, has made a BBC Radio 4 series about a “life-changing” journey to the Arctic. In the first episode, he says poets have had their "money's worth when it comes to nature" by using it as inspiration for centuries, and it's "time for poetry to pay something back". He told the BBC  that poets can convey what's happening with climate change in a way that scientists and journalists can't. In his poem ‘Polar Bear’ he imagines the animal he spotted on his visit being destined to roam in ever narrower circles in search of scarcer food, until all it can do is reach up for the North Star and "cling by a single claw".

In another work, Armitage describes his boat drifting through the remains of an "ancient empire of snow" that appears to have been smashed to ruins, leaving the "marbled wreckage" of imagined icy temples, palaces and tombs.

A third poem is inspired by a conversation with a scientist who is researching seabirds whose stomachs contain pieces of plastic from around the world. "In the small intestine/of the little auk/we found Mexico City, Manila, Shanghai, New York."

In his BBC Radio 4 series about the trip he says: "It's occurred to me recently that we are doing terrible damage to the planet, and the planet can't speak up for itself. It doesn't have an articulate voice in that way. And I started to think that that might be part of the role of the poet in the contemporary age - to speak up for nature, rather than just use it in a poem."

When he studied geography at Portsmouth Polytechnic in the 1980s, "climate change was barely there as a topic. I don't remember that phrase coming up very often, and it certainly wasn't part of my study. But it's everything now - everything that was being observed and documented and recorded and measured by all the scientists in that place [the Arctic]. It dominates their thinking."

Armitage spent about a week in July on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, home to the world's most northerly permanent settlement and the UK Arctic Research Station. The region is warming much faster than the global average. What surprised him most?  "It was very warm."

The thermal clothes he was advised to pack stayed in his suitcase as the temperature hovered around 11C for four or five days.

"In some ways it was incredibly fortunate to have that kind of stillness, calmness, visibility - just to be able to see so clearly its incredibly breathtaking beauty." But it was a "weird beauty.  You're seeing things you probably shouldn't be able to see - the sides of mountains which, up until recently, were covered in glacial ice; the insides of the glaciers as the front end is carving off; islands appearing which they thought were parts of the mainland; lakes forming at the front of glaciers which were never there on the maps before.

"Literally, the maps are changing. So [it has] this very unstable and literally fluid geography, which tests your belief in the stability of the world and the planet."

Seeing the effects of climate change for himself was "a life-changing experience" and made him come to the conclusion that the planet as we have traditionally thought about it "doesn't exist any more".

"It exists in pockets and patches," he says. "But it's not there any more. It's a kind of fiction. That's this really heavy sense that I've come back with, or it's some kind of awakening to a situation."

He doesn't want to sound gloomy, he stresses. "But I felt as if I were writing elegies, actually."

 

Poet Laureate in the Arctic is on Radio 4 on Tuesdays at 11:30 BST, and on BBC Sounds. The Cryosphere by Simon Armitage is published by Faber

 

PHOTOGRAPH: BBC