Book Talk at Athenaeum Library

You are invited to a talk by the poet, environmentalist and biographer, Denys Trussell, concerning his recent book, Albatross Neck. This is a work both of prose and poetry, illustrated extensively by the Dunedin-based painter, Nigel Brown. The talk concerns the vital interaction between the arts and the environment. Why the title Albatross Neck? It refers to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, one of the earliest ecological poems in English. In it, the mariner, who shot the albatross, has the dead bird hung around his neck by his crew-mates to induce his guilt in needlessly killing a living being.

Trussell, a long-time author and ecological campaigner, helped establish, in 1975, Friends of the Earth in Aotearoa New Zealand. He still works for them. His ecological writings have been published in Britain, France, Germany, the USA and Aotearoa New Zealand.  While working in London he edited a definitive philosophical work, The Way, An Ecological World View by Edward Goldsmith, the activist who established The Ecologist magazine, still publishing in several  countries.

Trussell’s biography of the New Zealand poet, ARD Fairburn, won the PEN Best First Book of Prose in 1985; his fifth book of poems, Walking into the Millennium, was short-listed in the Montana Book Awards in 1999; his Collected Poems was published in 2019. Albatross Neck, his fifteenth book, discusses how the arts are a seedbed of ecological ideas and environmental activism.

There will be time for discussion of the material Denys presents. The book will be available for viewing at the talk.