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”.
Born in Colchester, Essex, to Norman Stampfer, an actuary, and Jean (nee Smiles), a housewife, she was originally called Pamela, but soon became known as Kim. She went to Wycombe Abbey school in Buckinghamshire, and studied English at Oxford University, where she met and married Oliver Taplin in 1964. They separated in 1988 and later divorced. She lived for 50 years in rural Oxfordshire, where her old stone cottage was filled with wild flowers and a smell of fresh baking.
Over the years Kim worked in a travelling theatre company, a library and an organic farm. She was a teacher, registrar, parish clerk and workshop-leader before becoming a full-time writer in the 1980s. She also protested at Greenham Common, held peace vigils, marched for the planet and campaigned for rights of way.
As well as writing several collections of poems and numerous essays and reviews, Kim published travelogues. One of these, Three Women in a Boat (1993), is an engaging account of rowing up the Thames from Oxford to Cricklade. In it, Kim evokes the restorative powers of the river with its “common, extraordinary beauty” and meditates, among the meadowsweet and moorhens, on art, nature, sexism and sadness.
Her last years were spent in Dorset, still writing, reading, walking and birdwatching. She tackled the Guardian crossword every day, even on the morning of the day she died. Her final poem, On My Watch, describes, among other things, the garden birds outside her window.
She is survived by her partner since 1992, fellow poet Jeremy Hilton, the two children from her marriage, Nat and me, and by two grandchildren.
