This conversation between leading poet John Burnside, pictured, and Costa prize winning writer Helen Macdonald at Aldeburgh poetry festival was billed as “language and nature’. But it proved to be about the wild: the wild in nature, the uncanny in ourselves.

Helen Macdonald, replacing Richard Mabey at shortish notice, wrote  H is for Hawk, winner of the Costa Book of the Year in 2014. Macdonald, to work through the death of her father, trained a hawk and lived with it constantly, taming a predator, a wild thing, until one day she saw the countryside through its flying eyes. A place of hunting stripped bare of all human naming.

John Burnside, whose poetry has dealt with the countryside in many guises, suffers from insomnia. He spoke of leaving his home at night in countryside changed by a heavy snowfall, and hearing an uncanny sound. He read his poem about this the following evening: a poem filled with understated menace. The sound he sought proving to be nameless but, in himself, found its own wild echo.

But it is too easy to make the brute distinction: nature good, civilisation bad. Burnside had visited the Sami people of northern Norway, had learned from them how humans had to live supporting each other against the wild in extreme climates, or perish. Macdonald had realised that her life with her hawk was no more or less natural than a farmer living with his stock and his field.

Those fields had been populated with a surfeit of species, then numberless. Burnside recalled his grandmother speaking of the countryside’s dwindling variety. Now he himself was of an age to remark on the progress of loss.

In a separate talk on poetry and freedom Burnside used his 15-minute slot to inveigh against the Scottish government for overturning local objections on issues like wind turbines, which he linked to the disappearance of peregrine falcons from a quarry near his home. He talked of Scotland’s Braveheart myth, and how “we invited Alex Salmond to do anything he liked with us”.   

A number of the poems that he read in the Britten Studio on Saturday night, from a forthcoming collection, had an undertone of ecological disaster. Burnside said that the idea of “us here, and nature over there, somewhere” was “wrong, of course, but kind of true, which is sad”.

He concluded his reading with these haunting lines: “That far cry in the dark … deep in the well of my throat, as I live and breathe.”