‘Elemental: Water’, launched on weds 13th May 2026 at Pembroke’s
auditorium on Trumpington Street, Cambridge
“Ted Hughes said that fishermen and poets carry a biological dynamo around in their heads which enables them to notice things. He also argued that the trouble with environmental debate is that it breeds more debate, more political brochures, and promises that go nowhere—they just feed into themselves. But if we can find the right language, to touch the heart, then change can happen as swiftly as it needs to.”
“The Elemental Poetry Cambridge project aims to find that language – and produce five annual anthologies full of it. And anyone, of any age, with a connection to Cambridge can be a part of it, by writing poems and prose poems about the elements of our world – water, fire, air, earth, ether – however they experience them.” Mark Wormald
https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/elemental-poetry-cambridge
“This project encompasses an annual cycle that extends further, with poet, publisher, and educator Peter Carpenter at the helm, guiding a group of skilled writers in offering free in-person poetry workshops during the autumn, winter, and spring at Pembroke College and various locations around Cambridge…this initiative will unfold for five years…we will call for submissions of poems and prose poems for a collection of themed anthologies, particularly those emerging from the workshops. All works will be published by us at Worple Press, starting with the inaugural anthology titled Elemental: Water, co-edited by Peter Carpenter, Mark Wormald and Michael McKimm.
To support environmental stewardship, we pledge to donate at least 30% of the profits from each anthology to a cause aligned with its specific theme.” Peter and Amanda Carpenter, Co-Directors, Worple Press
ELEMENTAL: WATER poetry anthology curated by Dr Mark Wormald, Peter Carpenter & Michael McKimm Elemental Poetry Cambridge
https://worplepress.com/elemental-poetry-cambridge/
Published by Worple Press and on sale here : https://worplepress.com/product/elemental-water/
A celebration of water in all its forms, Elemental gathers new poems by writers of all ages who live in or have a connection with Cambridge. Discover poems about waterfalls and waterbirds and watercolour paintings. Poems about rising tides and threatened chalk streams. Poems that praise the world’s rivers alongside the dishwater in a kitchen sink. Poems embracing Cambridge’s local waters – the Fens, the Cam – as well as distant oceans.
‘What a pleasure to stretch out here and let these words of water wash over in a sitting. Water, its being and nature, its waterscapes and watermarks are all explored here within many themes, memories and poetic retelling.’
– Emma Montlake, Environmental Law Foundation
‘This eye-opening anthology is a small wonder. Its imaginative reckonings of human interactions with the natural world can only help us to appreciate and value water, the matter of life, with increased sensitivity and awe.’
– Dr Tom Appleby, Blue Marine Foundation
‘air above us
climbs over waves to become our breath
that sweet sweep of black
is the night combining with the deep’
excerpt from ‘Water’ by Helen Pletts, Elemental: Water
“In 2024, I was suddenly aware of the sea’s contribution to our planet’s oxygen and the mysteriousness of this realisation so late on in my life. Understanding the connectedness of everything is essential to our own survival. I have been fascinated by the sea all my life, from the Welsh Coast as a child to the East Anglian Coast as an adult. Every night I sleep to the sounds of the ocean on my phone App; her relevance embraces me”
Helen Pletts 海伦·普莱茨, 11th May 2026.
Chinese translation of ‘water’ 水 by Helen Pletts 海伦·普莱茨 in full here:
水
我们竟如此浑然不觉
甚至我们的呼吸也源于它，
我们上方的空气
攀越波浪，化作我们的呼吸。
那片茫茫的迷人的黑暗，
是夜晚与深渊的交融，
在共享的空气华盖下昏昏欲睡，
而她是突然辽阔起来的气息，
漫过海贝壳与沙地缓缓呼出，
在她呼气时，我们借用了她的生机。
2024年11月9日 海伦·普莱茨
Translated by Ma Yongbo 马永波
Green Turtle, BLUE MARINE FOUNDATION, FACEBOOK
https://www.facebook.com/Bluemarinef?
30% of any book-sale profits will be donated to BLUE MARINE, ACTION TO PROTECT OUR OCEAN, learn more about them here
https://www.bluemarinefoundation.com/
BLUE MARINE FOUNDATION is a conservation charity founded in London in 2010.
We work to protect and restore life in the ocean.
‘Crayfish lie motionless on the stream bed
growing in secrecy; blue submarines
listening to my stillness.
I startle them with the shadow of my hand—
they burst backward, flash pale bellies,
stirring yellow plumes in the water,
then vanish under rotting leaves.’
Excerpt from ‘Spring Stream’ by Ma Yongbo 马永波, Elemental: Water,Translated by Ma Yongbo 马永波 and Helen Pletts 海伦·普莱茨 in 2025
“while working together on our co-translation, I have discovered that many of Yongbo’s 永波 poems concentrate on his own minute examination of our natural world—in fact, his name Yongbo 永波 actually means ‘eternal water’, so I asked him if we could translate a poem of his together on the theme of water and ‘Spring Stream’ 春溪 is the poem he chose.
I had to look up all the water species he refers to and this research was a joy to me, to be able to encounter new wildlife friends”
Helen Pletts 海伦·普莱茨, 11th May 2026
Original Chinese version of ‘Spring Stream’ 春溪 by Ma Yongbo 马永波 in full here:
春溪
水流变慢，放宽处
游鱼数头，细小如柳叶
与自己的影子平行飞行
如同主机和僚机
使自己的军队凭空多出一倍
小龙虾伏在水底不动
暗暗成长
如青色潜水艇倾听我的寂静
我用手影把它们惊起
它们弹射，翻白，尾巴绷紧
水中搅起黄色烟雾
隐身于腐叶之下
风过，叶落，涟漪扩大了寂静
草虾惊跳
光阴不动
我不动
蝌蚪全都不见了
万里外的北方
一条条河流渐次腾起烟雾
无数的喇蛄虾爬上河岸
像烧红了的救火车
一排排，一队队
停在草丛
黑白翅膀的鸟
从溪流这边，从我的身影里起飞
投向对岸的幽暗
马永波
ELEMENTAL: WATER is also available for sale in the book store in the entrance hall of Cambridge University Library.
https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/livingwater
It is, currently, a very water-themed book stall: the exhibition Mark Wormald has curated,
Living Water: Poetry, Art and the Fight for Clean Rivers is now open to the public, until the 5th December 2026, from 9.00 am to 6.00 pm Monday to Saturday at the University Library (but closed on bank holidays) and at Pembroke College’s Exhibition Room, over the level crossing from the Porter’s Lodge on Trumpington Street, from 2.30 to 4.30 Tuesday to Saturday.
Dr Mark Wormald at Pembroke College
Mark Wormald has been fishing since the age of four. He is an award-winning poet, winning the Newdigate Prize at Oxford in 1988 and an E. C. Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 1995. Mark has been a Fellow in English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, since 1992. His first office was once the bed-sitting room in which Ted Hughes dreamed of a burned fox. He edited Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers for Penguin Classics and more recently co-edited two collections of essays: Ted Hughes: from Cambridge to Collected (2013) and Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture(2018).
Peter Carpenter, Photography by Christopher King
Peter Carpenter
https://bowieland.co.uk/about/
taught English in secondary schools from 1980 until 2021, working in various roles including Head of Department and Director of Teaching and Learning. He was made a Visiting Fellow at the University of Warwick in 2000 and was Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Reading during 2007-08. He is now a freelance writer, tutor and editor.
He has co-directed Worple Press
a thriving independent micro-press, specialising in arts and poetry titles since 1997 and has edited and published over fifty books including work by many major writers including Iain Sinclair, Elizabeth Cook and Clive Wilmer.
He has worked in many school writing projects including ‘Write Over London’ at Kenwood House in June 2011, Canning School, Eastbourne College, Dulwich College, Wellington College, Eton College and Radley College (as writer in residence) and the Marsh Academy, for example. He has run writing workshops at many universities, including Bolton, Exeter, Reading, Warwick and colleges at Oxford (Magdalen) and Cambridge (Sidney Sussex and Pembroke).
Amanda Carpenter receiving her Environmental/Sustainability: Champion of the Year, LEGAL 500 UK ESG Award (Legal Sector) in 2026. She is the founder and CEO of Achill Legal, as well as co-founder and Director of Legal Charter 1.5 and Director of the LSA.
An optimist and lifelong conservationist, Amanda has spent her career as a changemaker in the climate space, now using her network and expertise to convene collaborations, creating the space for the challenging conversations which lead to ambitious action.
Amanda is also co-director and co-founder of Worple Press, an independent arts and poetry publishing house and trustee on the Environmental Law Foundation.
Michael McKimm
Michael McKimm was born in Belfast and grew up near the Giant’s Causeway. A graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme, he won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and was an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa in 2010. He now lives in London where he works for the Geological Society Library.
Michael has published the poetry collections Still This Need (Heaventree Press, 2009), Fossil Sunshine (Worple Press, 2013) and Because we could not dance at the wedding(Worple Press, 2023) and edited the anthologies MAP: Poems After William Smith’s Geological Map of 1815 (Worple Press, 2015) and The Tree Line: Poems for Trees, Woods & People (Worple Press, 2017). His work has appeared in anthologies including Best of Irish Poetry 2010 (Southword Editions, 2009), Best British Poetry 2012 (Salt, 2012), Dear World & Everyone In It: New Poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe, 2013), The Future Always Makes Me So Thirsty: New Poets from the North of Ireland (Blackstaff Press, 2016), Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry (Lifeboat Press, 2021) and Windfall: Irish Nature Poems to Inspire and Connect (Hachette, 2023).
Research for Fossil Sunshine was funded by Arts Council England Grants for the Arts and was a collaboration with Earth scientists to create a new series of poems addressing the geology of climate change. Find out more at www.writtenintherocks.wordpress.com
‘This is an anthology which pulls you into its heart-filled swell and leaves you standing on the sun-baked bank, glistening in its vivid, imaginative language. Each poet’s treatment of water feels personal, intentional, and deeply alive.’
Angus Allman, Director, Cambridge Poetry Festival and CB1 Poetry
‘As an editor, I too recognise the power of poetry, and I stand shoulder to shoulder with Dr Mark Wormald, Peter Carpenter and Michael McKimm. Elemental: Water marks the launch not only of a single anthology, but of the first in a series devoted to all five elements – and arguably the most vital, for without water there is no life.
This significant gathering of poets of all ages offers a powerful breadth of voices, leaving the reader in no doubt of the depth of feeling these poets hold for our extraordinary planet: ‘I begin, dreaming me into stream: gin-clear, no miracle too small.’ — Lindsay Fursland’
Dan Leighton, Editor, Cambridge Poetry
‘Elemental: Water launch event: a celebration of new writing for the planet from Cambridge, and a gala poetry reading at Pembroke College’
All images under individual copyright © to either Dr Mark Wormald, Peter Carpenter,
Worple Press, Michael McKimm, Blue Marine Foundation
.