Poetry, art
and the
fight for
clean rivers
Literary giants’ unseen
works brought to light
in major new exhibition
"Without living water, we die."
Barrie Cooke
Unpublished works by Nobel-prize winning poet Seamus Heaney go on display in Cambridge alongside never-before-displayed letters, poetry and works of art by Barrie Cooke, Ted Hughes and others.
Living Water: Poetry, Art and the Fight for Clean Rivers is a major new exhibition opening to the public at Cambridge University Library and Pembroke College, Cambridge, from Friday, March 20-Saturday, December 5, 2026.
The free exhibition uncovers the extraordinary, decades-long creative friendship between artist Barrie Cooke and poets Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, and John Montague and reveals the inspiration each poet or artist in Cooke’s remarkable friendship circle drew from the elemental landscapes so central to their imaginative lives.
It illuminates the life of the rivers, lakes and bogs of the UK and Ireland and chronicles both the joy found among nature’s beauty, as well as the rising horror Cooke and his devoted friends felt at the pollution and degradation of the waterways they cherished.
The exhibition showcases a wealth of never-before-seen or displayed works by Cooke and Hughes as well as two unpublished poems and hitherto unknown children’s short story, ‘Ronan and the Riverman’, by Heaney, 1995 Nobel Laureate for Literature.
The ‘child’s story’ as Heaney put it and his unpublished poem The Island were inspired by a 1971 visit to the house on the River Nore where Cooke lived and worked with his partner the Dutch ceramicist Sonja Landweer and their young daughter Aoine.
Living Water takes place jointly at Cambridge University Library and Pembroke College, Cambridge, which acquired the Barrie Cooke archive in 2020.
Barrie Cooke's sketchbook. Credit: Barrie Cooke Archive/Pembroke College, Cambridge.
Barrie Cooke's sketchbook. Credit: Barrie Cooke Archive/Pembroke College, Cambridge.
"This exhibition is the first opportunity to share the riches of that archive; the letters and drawings to and from Hughes, Heaney and Cooke reveal how writers and artists developed ideas in conversation with each other."
Exhibition Curator, Dr Mark Wormald
"At the heart of their friendship was a shared passion for water and the life it sustained," adds Dr Wormald, Fellow in English at Pembroke College, and the author of the critically acclaimed book The Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes (2022).
"Though they each brought their own emotions and attitudes to it, from the 1960s onwards it was a defining element in the time they spent together and in the art they made. Through Living Water, we see how these friends worked together.
“It’s not just about the quality of the work they produced for and with each other, their loyalty to one another, the time they spent together, or the sources and places of inspiration they shared. It’s the fact that more than half a century ago they were trying to change public consciousness of the vital important to us and our world of living water.
"That message remains as urgent and as topical as ever.”
The exhibition reveals how painting, poetry and environmental concern flowed together across five decades, and why a shared passion for rivers and lakes remains so urgent today, demonstrating how art can respond powerfully to environmental crisis.
At Pembroke College, visitors will witness how Cooke’s early years in the West of Ireland informed his fascination with primitive stone carvings, Sheela-na-gigs, to which Hughes, Heaney and Montague all responded in their poetry.
The Pembroke part of the exhibition also reveals rare insights among unpublished works and never-before-exhibited artworks by Cooke, as well as objects such as Ted Hughes’ fishing rods and Cooke’s own fibreglass ‘coracle’, the boat he designed and built in 1970 and in which Ted and Nicholas Hughes both fished.
Dr Wormald first met Cooke in May 2012 at his house above Lough Arrow.
“I had come across his name in the fishing diaries of Ted Hughes,” he explains. What began as a literary enquiry quickly became something more significant.
“Browsing his bookshelves, I saw evidence of his long and close friendship with Ted Hughes and discovered, to my surprise, an equally intimate relationship with Seamus Heaney.”
"Ted and I had fish
and fishing in common,
but Seamus and I have
mud and art in common.
Outside of his family
I’m the closest man to Seamus alive."
Barrie Cooke
Born in Britain and settled in Ireland from 1954 until his death in 2014, Cooke always lived by water: in County Clare, in County Kilkenny, on the River Nore, beside its sister the Barrow, and then above Lough Arrow in County Sligo. An expressionist painter and devoted fisherman, he regarded water as the essential force in creation.
At Cambridge University Library, visitors can encounter creative exchange at first hand. Letters, drafts and sketchbooks reveal ideas forming in real time: artists and poets testing language and image against one another.
The objects shed fresh light not only on other poets and artists as well as Heaney and Hughes, but on Cooke’s central role in shaping their thinking.
When Cooke suggested to Heaney in 1970 that they collaborate on bogs – "a four-dimensional bog-wallow" – the result would become some of the poet’s most powerful and controversial work, better known through Heaney’s collection North (1975).
Their illustrated edition of the Bog Poems, published a fortnight before by Ted Hughes’ sister Olwyn, stands as a testament to the intensity of their artistic partnership.
Equally, Hughes’ engagement with fish and river life gained new visual force in dialogue with Cooke’s paintings and lithographs.
"The stakes couldn’t be higher. Healthy water sustains life. Polluted water threatens not just the natural world but humanity itself. Living Water traces how poetry, painting and environmental activism can come together, prompted by meetings and conversations beside water."
Dr Mark Wormald
Pike Fishing II by Barrie Cooke, 1980. Credit: Barrie Cooke Archive/Pembroke, College, Cambridge.
Pike Fishing II by Barrie Cooke, 1980. Credit: Barrie Cooke Archive/Pembroke, College, Cambridge.
Ted Hughes (left) and Barrie Cooke at the Dart Gorge, 1988. Photo by John Whorley.
Ted Hughes (left) and Barrie Cooke at the Dart Gorge, 1988. Photo by John Whorley.
Crow record cover by Barrie Cooke, 1972. Credit: Barrie Cooke Archive/Pembroke College, Cambridge.
Crow record cover by Barrie Cooke, 1972. Credit: Barrie Cooke Archive/Pembroke College, Cambridge.
“Rivers are the veins of a landscape: life-giving, lively presences, who have shaped our histories, languages, imaginations and relations in these islands since at least the end of the last Ice Age.
"Yet today rivers across the UK are struggling under grievous burdens of pollution and neglect. Living Water is both fascinating and urgent: it illuminates how profoundly water can shape art, poetry and friendship - and reminds us that human fate flows with that of rivers, and always has.”
Award-winning author, and Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities at the University of Cambridge, Robert Macfarlane
Watch our short film about the Living Water exhibition at Cambridge University Library (please allow cookies to view, or watch on YouTube).
As part of the University Library exhibition, the Library has placed historic material in dialogue with contemporary art. Work by artist Susan Derges, inspired by the rivers and landscape of Hughes’ beloved Devon, extends the exhibition’s concerns into the present.
Passage 2012, Digital C-type print (Devon) by Susan Derges © Susan Derges
Passage 2012, Digital C-type print (Devon) by Susan Derges © Susan Derges
Living Water: Poetry, Art and the Fight for Clean Rivers at Cambridge University Library, and Pembroke College Cambridge, runs from Friday, March 20-Saturday, December 5, 2026.
