How to Save a River – Ben Verinder

MICHAEL MARKS AWARDS – ENVIRONMENTAL POET OF THE YEAR 2024 WINNER

“Our winner this year showed vast creativity, great play and skilled control in How to Save a River. The uncertainty of place and time in this collection, full as it is of constant movement – alongside the straightforward stoppings of grief found in Signs of life, River deep, mountain high and The current – felt a fitting tribute to the crossovers between world and individual which we all navigate.

These are moving and surprising poems. They lament the degradation of river habitats whilst elegising, too, the loss of a parent. We visit a fire in Cyprus, becks and rivers in the Lake District and the US. Animals of water swim through much of the pamphlet: eels, smolts, efts, crayfish, the salamander. Among this burgeoning life, the strange face of loss is never far from sight. This means that the poems achieve a lovely, multifaceted evocation of human interactions with the life of water, an element from which, finally, strength, comfort and no small degree of hope are drawn.

There’s a beautifully delicate translucency to the wide-ranging and powerfully arranged poems of this pamphlet. Without having to moralise or even raise their voice, these memorable poems make themselves heard.”

Judges’ comments, Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year 2024