Christopher Powici

My poetry engages with the experience of environment and place with a special emphasis on wildlife. Put simply, I like to write about, among other things, woods, herons, deer, rivers, fields, hares and hills. I am also keen to register how the ‘natural’ and ‘human’ worlds overlap one another. Therefore the landscapes of my poems include fences, gates, doors, streets, bridges and other places where the dialogue of culture and nature is at its most expressive. In trying to capture the sheer thrill of the human/animal encounter or the sense of intoxicating wonder that a wild place, or sometimes even the most familiar environment (a garden, a local wood) can induce, I aim to get the details right. The world is an intensely physical place and that sense of physicality reverberates in the imagination. Poetry is of course, about self-expression but it is also a great way of understanding and celebrating the world that lies beyond the individual self. Good poetry puts us in touch with that world. I am pleased to say that the success of my own poetry in putting these ideas across has been recognized with a New Writers Bursary from The Scottish Arts Council in 2002. I have also won first prize in The BBC Wildlife Poet of The Year awards and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in the USA. I am currently working on a series of poems arising from journeys I’ve made to the west coast of Scotland. I am also making further forays into ‘Flash Fiction’, that strange and fertile literary territory where prose and poetry engage creatively with one another.