Keep All the Parts

ISBN: 9781915434135

Format: Paperback, 32 pages,

Available (Published: March 2024)

£7.00

Book details

A well-known conservationist once remarked that the first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. The scale of our impact on the environment now amounts to more than tinkering, but the case for giving nature space to move, adapt and recover remains. Our survival may depend on restoring the ecosystems that we have damaged and disrupted.

Roy Young spent his career making this argument as a scientist. In retirement he has been able to explore the importance of nature in more poetic ways, focusing particularly on his surroundings on the edge of Nottingham, and occasionally travelling beyond. This collection includes his reflections on the landscapes, plants and animals that he finds around him, and the beauty of simple, ordinary places.

About the Author

Roy Young has had poems published in Obsessed with Pipework and Reach. He was also highly commended in the Beacon of Light National Trust Kedleston Hall Poetry Competition and in a Writer Highway poetry competition on the theme of dogs. After a career involving academic writing and editing of books and journals on issues relating to the environment, and as an artist with a special interest in landscapes, Roy discovered poetry through the Writer Highway courses in Nottingham. He is fascinated by the different ways of seeing the world that poetry and painting can offer.

1 review for Keep All the Parts

  1. 5 out of 5

    –

    Roy Young is a scientist, poet, artist and this collection of poems reflects the beauty he finds in landscape, wildlife, the sea. He pays special attention to his more immediate, ordinary surroundings. There’s plenty to admire here – my own favourites are ‘What trees do’, ‘Ocean song’, ‘Map of you’, ‘Forest engineers’, ‘Gaia’s song’. These quiet poems allow Nature the space to almost speak for itself.

    Acorns have ideas
    of trees inside them
    and dreams of forest…
    (Forest engineers)

    Despite some apparently ominous titles (‘Extinction Stories’, ‘The assassin’, ‘Not in my back yard’, and ‘Erosion’), ‘Keep All the Parts’ sings with awe and respect for the natural world to highlight concern for the environment. These stories are delivered without sentimentality, but with such heart that after the final poem, which is almost an incantation, we are left with a sense of hope for our planet and our own human nature.

    May we touch ice and need it.
    May we feel heat and read it.
    May we see change and heed it.
    (Gaia’s song)

    Julie Burke

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