My mother, Kim Taplin, who has died aged 80, was a writer and poet. Her work celebrated the natural world in ways that link the personal and political. The English Path, first published in 1979, explores footpaths in literature, showing how they connect us with each other and with nature. Her second book of cultural analysis, Tongues in Trees (1989) asserts that “human health, physical, psychological and spiritual, is wedded to that of the earth”.
In 1990 Kim published her first full-length collection of poems, By the Harbour Wall, in which details of the changing seasons, from plum blossom to flocks of winter redwings, are as vital as a natural history of Britain’s nuclear sites. She was always prophetically clear about the urgent environmental crisis. But her work is essentially optimistic, exhorting us to “bring in better times”.
