How might a poet respond to the rhythms and echoes of bats? Join us at the Botanic Garden for a unique evening that pairs natural science with poetic exploration.
As dusk settles, you’ll begin a guided walk through the Garden’s woodland paths to experience one of the UK’s most vital – yet often misunderstood – mammals. Using handheld detectors, we will tune in to the unique, high-frequency calls of bats as they navigate the night’s sky.
Along the way, ecopoet Dr Briony Hughes (Royal Holloway, University of London) will present an immersive performance from her latest poetry collection, Speculative Frequencies – a book inspired by her own nocturnal encounters with bats in the Surrey Hills.
This event invites you to re-experience the Botanic Garden through multisensory and multispecies perspectives, revealing the language of the night sky and the incredible creatures that inhabit it.
Suitable for adults aged 16+. This event is not suitable for children. We are holding an alternative bat walk for families on 22 August. Bookings close 27 August.
The walk element of the event is weather dependent. In poor weather only the poetry reading will take place, at an indoor venue at the Botanic Garden.
Dr Briony Hughes (she/her) is a poet and lecturer in creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she leads the poetry pathway for the MA Creative Writing. She has published six books of poetry including Speculative Frequencies (Permeable Barrier, 2025), June: A Haunting (Intergraphia, 2024), and Rhizomes (Broken Sleep Books, 2023), whilst her monograph on Hydropoetics is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic. Her limited-edition artists’ books have been collected by the National Poetry Library, The British Library, Senate House Library, The Bodleian, Kings College London Special Collections, and elsewhere. She runs Osmosis Press and coedits the Resurgence and Ecologist Magazine poetry feature.
About Speculative Frequencies:
The bat as a cultural figure is small, blind, nocturnal, and occasionally sinister, but in Hughes’ poems they become a medium through which to interrogate the most pressing issues of our time; what happens when we abandon concepts of human exceptionalism and see ourselves as animals existing with other animals within an ecosystem? In a book of innovative engagements with language and visuality, Hughes explores the enmeshment of humanity within the natural world, and finds a moving kinship with these exceptional, easily overlooked creatures.
Praise for Speculative Frequencies:
“The connection is there; it has been all along, but the poet boils it to our surface, dear reader. This collection by Briony Hughes is a masterpiece in feeling the majesty of other creatures vibrating on our skin. Feel the tabbing tapping through a tooth! I love this book!”
—CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Penguin, 2024)
“Where Nagel gave up on answering the question of what it is like to be a bat, Briony Hughes leans in. This is a poet who sound-sees, who turns the page into a night sky aflutter with creaturely life. Speculative Frequencies is at once an experimental field guide, playful eco-survey and love poem to the more-than-human world.”
— Isabel Galleymore, author of Baby Schema (Carcanet, 2024)