In a world that feels increasingly disconnected from the natural world, poet and storyteller Tom Hirons has made it his life’s work to reconnect people with their inner wildness. In a wide-ranging interview, he shared his fascinating journey from a frustrated writer to a poet who finds his voice in the wilderness, and the profound meaning behind his work.
Tom’s path to poetry was not a conventional one. He spent his early twenties "trying to write novels and become a great hero of literary fiction" before transitioning to graphic novels and then to poetry. The pivotal moment came in his early 30s when he did a wilderness fast on the slopes of Cadair Idris in Snowdonia. After this profound experience, poetry became the only language that made sense to him, and he found that something had "happened where poetry was the language that made sense to talk about the kind of experiences I was going through." He continues this ancient practice today, believing it keeps his language from becoming "thin and modern and cardboardy." He even connected his own experience to the tradition of Taghairm—a Scottish practice of lying in a freshly flayed bullock's hide behind a waterfall to seek inspiration.
This deep connection to nature is the heart of his most famous poem, "Sometimes a Wild God." Tom believes the poem’s magic lies in its ability to "wake up old parts of our soul" that are buried under the "veneer of modernity." He describes how his own inspiration for the poem came from a line he was sure he had read somewhere but could not find. In his conception, he was lucky enough to "catch a glimpse of something in the other world that was resonant enough for me" and had worked on his skills to "be able to follow and lay down in this world." For him, this is not just a theory; it's a personal truth. He recounted a powerful story from his childhood in the "Saints" villages of East Anglia: he and his mother saw a figure with the body of a man and the head of a deer. He says simply, "All I know is that when I was seven years old, I saw a God in a field."
Today, as society grapples with its disconnection from nature, Tom sees the archetypes of the "Wild God" and the Green Man as a figure of hope. He talks about his relationship with the land he lives on, Dartmoor, which he describes as a "great shaggy beast" that still "eats people." He says, "The spirits of the land, they're still vocal." He feels that through practices that dissolve the boundaries between us and the wild—from hiking ancient tracks to something as profound as a wilderness fast—we can find our "soul kernel," and get on with the important work of living. Ultimately, Tom says his goal as a poet is to "bring a twitch of a smile or a raised eyebrow to the Queen of Heaven," a mythological figure he writes for, and to leave something for his sons to show "this is who I really was when I wasn't just being your dad."