Elemental:Water: New Poetry for the Planet from Cambridge

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 embracing Cambridge's local waters -- the Fens, the Cam -- as well as distant oceans.

Elemental Poetry Cambridge combines two passions. One is for poetry, the other for the environment. Its tag line? New Poetry from Cambridge for the Planet. Elemental seeks to grow a culture where creative thinking and feeling through language feels natural, necessary. It finds inspiration from literary models and from life in and beyond the city we call home; and then it spreads the word, through five annual anthologies, each devoted to one of the five classical elements.

Foreword
Introducing Elemental
Thanks and acknowledgements 

Editorial note

water
What I know about water Genesis
Egret Rising
Bright the starlight
Sea Pantoum
Adder Stone
Hydro
Immersion
Happisburgh Beach
Waiting for the storm to pass Float
poem for the new year Waterfall
Mudlark
Fen Time
Visitare
All I have is this
Spring Stream
Silver November
Our Place
The River Lesson
midsommar
A Ploughman Imagines the Sea 

Nah am Wasser Gebaut
a chalk stream’s monologue 

The Last Drop
Watercolour
Lilith’s Balkan Genesis
The Grief Farmer
Variations

The Blue Poem 

Oh ocean 

OdetoaToad

a poem for dishes 

Water corrupts you 

Weather

Imagining the Atlantic 

Water’s many faces 

Cley-Next-The-Sea 

Longing

Emma Montlake 1 Mark Wormald 2 Peter Carpenter 4 Michael McKimm 6

Helen Pletts 9 Alice Tofaris 10 Heather Leigh 11 TravisWright 12 Dan Leighton 13 Matilda Myatt 15 Kate Robinson 16 Jon Stone 17 Sarah McHugh 18 Mary Shanahan 19 Tom Ling 20 Sienna Black 21 Esmé Beaumont 22 Zuyi Zhang 23 Jade Cuttle 24 David Thomas 26 Heather Irvine 27 Clare Best 29 Ma Yongbo 30 Nikolai Kazantsev 31 Di Beddow 32 Jane Monson 33 Pierre Musa HalimeWessel 34 Martine Maugüé 35 Matthias Ediger 36 Lindsay Fursland 38 Amira Skeggs 40 Kitty Wansell 41 Anna Saintonge 42 Mila Ottevanger 43 Jonathan Morley 44 Vona Groarke 46 Anagha Abrol 47 DaisyTozer 48 Veronica Hua 49 Maria Omena 50 Sonji Shah 51 Millie Jeffery 52 Rodin Zavarei 53 Geoffrey Heptonstall 55 Kate Noble 56 Notes on Contributors 59

Notes on Contributors

Anagha Abrol is a student at The Leys School, Cambridge. 

Esmé Beaumont is a PhD student (Keats and Parasocial Interaction) at Girton College.

Di Beddow has been a secondary school teacher and education leader for her whole career. She took early retirement to research 'The Cambridge of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath', completing a PhD in 2021.

Clare Best writes memoir, poetry and libretti. Her most recent publication is Beyond the Gate (Worple Press, 2023). An Associate Lecturer with the Open University and a Tutor for the Arvon Foundation, she held a Fellowship at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 2021.

Sienna Black recently graduated from the University of Cambridge. Her work was longlisted for the 'After Sylvia' poetry competition and she is a two-time UniSlam finalist (2024 and 2025) and placed third in the Hammer and Tongue (2024) finals.

Peter Carpenter is a freelance writer, tutor and publisher. His latest book is Bowieland:Walking in the Footsteps of David (Monoray, 2025).

Jade Cuttle is a BBC New Generation Thinker and AHRC-funded PhD researcher in Nature Poetry at the University of Cambridge.

Matthias 'Munkey' Ediger is a performance poet with a twist – usually at the end of his poems. He is a Hammer & Tongue Cambridge Slam Champion and Hammer & Tongue UK Championship Finalist.

Lindsay Fursland is a retired English teacher and alumnus 59 of Pembroke College. He runs the Poetry Society's Stanza group in Cambridge and is on the committee of CB1, an organisation which puts on monthly poetry events at the Town & Gown pub in the city centre.

Vona Groarke is the current Writer-in-Residence at St John’s College, Cambridge and the Ireland Professor of Poetry 2025-28. Infinity Pool, her ninth collection of poetry, was published in 2025.

Geoffrey Heptonstall has lived in Cambridge since 1986. He is the author of six collections of poetry, a novel and many stories and has received awards from the Arts Council, the St Katharine Foundation, Script Sessions and Aval Ballan.

Veronica Hua grew up between the United States, Singapore, and China. She holds a BA in English from Reed College and an MPhil in English from the University of Cambridge. She is currently based in Portland, Oregon.

Heather Skye Irvine graduated in English from Girton College in 2025. Her final-year dissertation focused on ways of thinking with and writing water.

Millie Jeffery is a London-based writer and musician, entering her third year studying English at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She has published and read poetry in London, Cambridge and Amsterdam.

Dr Nikolai Kazantsev is a research fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, specialising in supply chain interventions for cascade risks like pandemics, and a cellist interpreting and performing Bach Cello Suites.

Heather Leigh loves rowing, reading and sunflowers. She writes articles for Breathe and Teen Breathe and her poetry is published in zines and magazines. She studies English at Cambridge University.

Dan Leighton is a Cambridge poet, musician and founder of Cambridge Poetry Magazine. His poems often carry conflicting themes of redemption, longing, and imperfection. He also makes cheese. And recently taught himself to weld.

Tom Ling lives and works in Cambridge. He writes and performs poetry, music and songs.

Martine Maugüé is a French-Taiwanese writer who grew up in NewYork and London.A previous recipient of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, she is currently studying in Cambridge.

Sarah McHugh lives with her family in Histon, Cambridgeshire. She discovered the joys of wild swimming during the pandemic and now spends as much time as possible in or on water.

Michael McKimm is the editor of the Worple Press anthologies MAP: Poems After William Smith’s Geological Map of1815(2015)andTheTreeLine:PoemsforTrees,Woods& People (2017).

Matilda Myatt is a student at Cambridge University. She currently writes for Cambridge society magazines, and her translation of ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’ is on the Stephen Spender website (2023 Prizewinners).

Jane Monson is a published prose poet working on a 4th collection about climate change and childhood. She is a Tutor at Homerton College and Specialist Mentor at the Accessibility and Disability Resource Centre, University of Cambridge.

Jonathan Morley is an Eric Gregory Award and Cafe Writers Commission winning poet. He was the Programme Director at Writers Centre Norwich and for several years taughtCreativeWritingatSunYat-senUniversity,SouthChina. He now works for the British Council.

Kate Noble is a former English teacher now studying Psychology and Education at Cambridge.

Maria Omena moved from Brazil to England in 2016 and now calls St Neots, Cambridgeshire, home. She won the Fred Holland Poetry Award and the Writing Times Poetry Competition in 2017 and published a short collection 'There is no Light' in 2018.

Mila Ottevanger is an English teacher working in Cambridge who grew out of the fen. Despite (sort of) leaving, she finds its pull too strong not to write about.

Helen Pletts is a Cambridge-based poet, five times shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. Her poetry has been translated into many languages and she is the English co- translator of Chinese poet MaYongbo.

Kate Robinson is a PhD candidate in English at Pembroke College where she is writing about Ted Hughes and his relationship to early Welsh literature.

Sonji Shah is a PhD researcher working on geologic speculative fiction.

Mary Shanahan was born in Cornwall, where she left her heart, but she finds life in Cambridgeshire flatter, yet agreeable, and has been writing poetry here for about ten years.

Amira Skeggs is an artist and psychological scientist based in the United Kingdom. Her work explores how environmental and technological changes shape human experiences.

Jon Stone is a Derbyshire-born writer. His most recent short books are Unravelanche (Broken Sleep, 2021), Sandsnarl

(The Emma Press, 2021) and a pamphlet essay, Poems Are Toys (AndToysAre Good ForYou) (Calque,2023).

David Thomas is a conservationist, socio-economist and a programme director at Cambridge Conservation Initiative. He moved to a Cambridgeshire fen edge village over 25 years ago and regularly walks the lode bank through a landscape he finds paradoxically both timeless yet ever changing.

Alice Tofaris is a student at ImpingtonVillage College, Cambridgeshire.

Daisy Tozer is a Dorset-based poet about to start a PhD in English at Oxford.

Kitty Wansell is a student at The Perse School, Cambridge.

Pierre Musa Halime Wessel is a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge researching violent extremism. His creative writing was recognised with the 2025 Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett Prize.

Mark Wormald is a Fellow of Pembroke College Cambridge. The author of The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes (Bloomsbury, 2022), he is curator of a 2026 exhibition, ‘Living Water’, at the University Library and at Pembroke.

Travis Wright is a poet and professor based in Virginia, USA. He recently finished a PhD at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and his first collection, A Woodland Lexicon, is forthcoming from Little Gidding Press.

Ma Yongbo is the author of nine collections of poetry, a representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry and the founder of polyphonic writing and objectified poetics. He is the primary poet-translator of Western postmodern poetry on the mainland, including William Carlos Williams and John Ashbery.

Rodin Zavari is a student at The Perse School, Cambridge. Zuyi Zhang is a student at The Perse School, Cambridge.