I was asked to write a Teachers Resource for this year’s National Poetry Day, on the theme of ‘Environment’. I decided to focus on Circle Poems, a form I’ve used occasionally over the years, as a way of thinking about sustainability and recycling, as well as highlighting the temporal cycles we all live within – days, weeks, years, the four seasons, the waxing and waning moon.

I’ve included some examples of my own circle poems within it, and I’ll add a couple more here.

The ‘moon’ circle was published in Quait, issue 2 (2015).

The ‘Dansette’ circle was published in the anthology Turning Toward Living (2004).

The resouce was commissioned by the Scottish Poetry Library.

You can download the Teachers Resource here.