Over the past two years I’ve sometimes found myself trying to avoid thinking too deeply about the challenges that face us as a society. In the face of climate crisis and pandemic, many of us have felt doubly disempowered to enact any meaningful change. In spring 2022, as we emerged from a series of lockdowns where anxiety often threatened to overwhelm us, I wondered if it was time to try and open ourselves again — to those anxieties and fears — but in the company of the community we’ve all missed so much. And so, the idea for The Carbon Project was born. During my time as Poet in Residence for dlr County Council, I was keen to engage with local writers through a series of initiatives, but this one was particularly close to my heart. As part of my residency, I was working on a commission from Jamie Murphy’s Salvage Press to write a hybrid scientific essay/prose poem about the element Carbon, which will soon be published in a book made entirely (from paper to ink and everything in between) from carbon; the element which both supports all known life, and threatens the delicate ecosystems of our planet. While I was developing this work, I wondered what other people were thinking and feeling about our environment. Did they feel as helpless as I did? And might coming together as a group to discuss this feeling give rise to poetry? In planning workshops on climate writing, I was keen to avoid encouraging a purely elegiac tone. Poets are the wistful custodians of every dropped leaf and fallen flower, but the lyric contains multitudes and can make room for the kind of anger, or scorn, or joy that moves and changes the reader. And so I sought out some interesting cross-artform collaborators. We engaged with Cora Cummins and Saoirse Higgins’ wonderful On Steady Ground/ Unsteady Ground exhibition which ran in the Municipal Gallery in dlr LexIcon, with its themes of environmental change and deep time, and we had a visit from Anne Murray, Biodiversity Officer at Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, who talked to us about the meaningful measures that are being taken to protect and promote biodiversity. We also read poems that looked at climate crisis through the lenses of class, gender and race and generated our own work in response to these ideas. My thanks are due to everyone at the dlr Arts Office, especially to Carolyn Brown, for facilitating these initiatives during my residency. The poems that have emerged from The Carbon Project are infused with a sense of energy and possibility; from the sense of deep time and human endurance captured in Charlotte Buckley, Edel Burke and Hilary Casey’s poems, to the meditative and ominous tones of Sree Sen and Jo Sachs-Eldridge’s work, to the tactile immersion of Jess McKinney’s and Monica de Bhailís’s poems, and finally in the surreal and urgent flare of Emma Gleeson and Jane Robinson’s visions. I am proud to have worked with these inspired and inspiring poets, and grateful to have had the privilege of spending time with them. In these poetic responses I’m confident the reader will see enough flashes of inspiration to reinforce the belief that we belong to a species ingenious enough to save itself.