“No one who witnessed the storm firsthand will ever forget it”. 2017 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Great Storm of 1987 and was also the year Tamsin Treverton Jones’ book Windblown was published. The extra-tropical cyclone caused huge devastation, destroying natural landscapes and taking human lives.
The writer and poet has researched some of the lesser-known stories about the storm, and she talked through her book showing photographs, sculptures and excerpts of her poetry alongside her discussion.
She approached the storm from various perspectives, providing meteorological context as she told stories about human loss. She noted that in the aftermath of the storm many discoveries were made, and techniques developed, particularly by staff at Kew Gardens, which are still used in arboretums around the world.
Treverton Jones has been inspired by other poets who have written about the storm, including Grace Nichols and Benjamin Zephaniah. Her project began as a collection of thirty poems written about the human stories she researched, and eventually became Windblown. She hopes to publish that collection in the future.
If you liked this, you might like the Poetry Slam tonight at 8.30pm.