This short but immensely moving book carries the dedication: ‘For those who love the world enough to fight for it’. It carries the epigraph: ‘Tyger, tyger, burning bright’ – the first line of William Blake’s famous poem which presents the tiger as an image of awesome and relentless divine energy.

Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In forests of the night.
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry. 

Tiger Work may be a small book, but it is packed with marvellously imagined stories, parables and poems of lament – imagining a future visitor to a world without human beings; statements about us being the authors of our own annihilation; about the departure of the gods. But although they contain terrible warnings, they draw the reader in because they are so imaginative and unusual – so we go on reading!

There is plenty of poetry today about the impending – if not already present – climate catastrophe. The late Seamus Heaney acknowledged that poets today cannot help but address the matter, so I begin this introduction with some brief pointers to what we already have in this genre.

One of the truly great poems of the later 19th century is Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnet which starts: ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’, and which painfully pictures the destructive effects of human activity on nature:

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

There is a feeling today, however, that this heartfelt cry, with its final faith in the power of nature and the Holy Spirit, is not enough for us now. Things are much worse. Humanity is more culpable. We face a total collapse of ecosystems. 

Many of today’s poets strive, in various ways, to address this challenge. In 2015, Carol Ann Duffy, then UK Poet Laureate, curated a collection of twenty poems by different authors under the title Our Melting, Shifting, Liquid World [/], which presents pieces by many of our leading poets such as Don Patterson and Michael Symmons Roberts alongside readings by distinguished actors. It includes ‘The Last Snowman’ by the present Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, which expresses grief and loss with recognisable images of desperate pathos.

He drifted south
down an Arctic seaway
on a plinth of ice, jelly tots

weeping lime green tears
around both eyes,
a carrot for a nose

(some reported parsnip),
below which a clay pipe
drooped from a mouth

that was pure stroke-victim.
A red woollen scarf trailed
in the meltwater drool

at his base, and he slumped
to starboard, kinked,
gone at the pelvis […]

In 2020, Armitage himself set up a new annual prize, The Laurel Prize [/], for the best collection of poems ‘with nature and the environment at their heart’. Climate change is, he says, ‘a background hum that won’t go away’.

There are also many poems of loss and lament. One of Alice Oswald’s lectures as Professor Poetry at Oxford University last year was titled: ‘A Lament for the Earth’ [/], in which she speaks of ‘threnos’, or the traditional lament, often consoling, and the scream or howl of that which is inconsolable. 

Some poets seek to face the threatened destruction head-on, like Jorie Graham’s ‘Deep Water Trawling’ [/], which I found almost too painful to bear:

[…] if there is no one there there is still ghostfishing – nets abandoned in the
sea they continue through the centuries to catch – mammals fish shellfish – we die
of exhaustion or suffocation – the synthetic materials last forever […]

Or Jane Hirshfield’s ‘Ghazal for the End of Time’, which we discussed in our magazine interview last year. We have to honour the courage of such poets to face realities in their powerful imaginative work. 

And then there are poems of anger, like the bitter ‘Ariel’ by Carol Ann Duffy, with its ironic take on Shakespeare’s Ariel song:

Where the bee sucks
neonicotinoid insecticides
in a cowslip’s bell lie […]

One could go on: there are different modes of expressing grief, horror, exhortation or consolation as responses to what we see around us – and of which we are inevitably part. All are necessary.

But in Ben Okri’s book, I find something that holds these various strands of responses with something more: a strong energising spirit – what Okri himself calls ‘a spirit of ferocity and beauty.’ I want to draw attention to one poem in particular, ‘Tiger Work’, which invokes a spiritual energy, especially when read aloud as a kind of incantation. It begins with images of the tiger as a creature whose actual existence on the earth is threatened – ‘hunted every hour’ – along with other creatures like the fly, and the tragic death of the last bug. But the image is also, in an inspired imaginative connection, one of divine energy like Blake’s tiger.

It belongs to a higher order,
Composed of fire, mystery, dreams
An alternative route of evolution
Form and sign of a divine solution.

The tiger spirit…

Tells us we can be more.
Leap into better destinies than before.
Primed for great battles ahead
Between those who want us dead
And those who want to lift
The human song to its highest gift.

To read this poem aloud, or to hear it read, can be to participate in that spiritual energy which will strengthen us truly to honour our earth and to take whatever part we have in the future with courage.

In this video Ben Okri himself introduces the theme of the book (Duration: 2:35):

Tiger Work was published by Apollo in July 2023.

Barbara Vellacott
With a background in adult education and overseas development issues, Barbara Vellacott now teaches poetry. She is the poetry editor of Beshara Magazine, in which capacity she has master-minded the ‘Poems of These Times’ series.  For her previous article, ‘A Thing of Beauty…’ on Dante’s Divine Comedy, click here.