Ever since my childhood on a farm poetry has helped me pay attention to the world around me. Like a naturalist’s field guide, nature poems name, depict, and explore what might otherwise pass unnoticed. Now in the midst of environmental crisis I believe poets have a role alongside ecologists, farmers, and foresters to protect and restore our threatened habitats and species. Writing nature poetry helps me face and express loss while celebrating what still survives. I value poetry that connects us to what we love and gives us courage to imagine different ways of living.
I have a love of fields having grown up on a farm in the west of Ireland and now living on a hillside in Co. Wicklow.
The boundaried space of a field is like a poem in how it restricts and frees, hides and reveals, protects and exposes the life within. This anthology, first published in 1998, is testimony to what fields have meant and still mean to us. Every page reveals a moving poem by one of my favourite poets; Gillian Clarke, John Clare, Thomas Hardy, Denise Levertov, Seamus Heaney, Patrick Kavanagh, Alice Oswald.
The anthology is produced by Common Ground, a Devon-based charity that seeks to reconnect people with nature and inspire communities to become responsible for their local environment.
Meadows and fields exist at the boundary where human endeavors meet the natural world. The poems in this collection are drawn from across centuries of a literary tradition that uses the pastoral landscape as setting for exploring complex and timeless questions about that encounter between human and non-human existence. The poems were chosen as lyrical celebrations-or in some instances, eulogies-for fields, and for the old way of life that fields represent. Some of the poets evoke lullabies out of childhood memory; others beat archetypal time to the rhythm of work: plowing and sowing, haying and threshing. More recent poems document…
Soon after it was published sixteen years ago my wife gave me a gift of Earth Shattering. I’ve valued this anthology ever since as an essential guide to ecopoetry.
The selection of poets includes writers of the past as well as leading contemporary poets from around the world. In particular the wilderness poetry of ancient China was a revelation to me as was the modern Native American poetry.
The editor Neil Astley’s summary of the key issues debated within ecocriticism is excellent and I often return to the clarity of his definition: “eco poetry goes beyond traditional nature poetry to take on distinctly contemporary issues, recognising the interdependence of all life on earth, the wildness and otherness of nature, and the irresponsibility of our attempts to tame and plunder nature.”
"Earth Shattering" lines up a chorus of over two hundred poems addressing environmental destruction. Whether the subject - or target - is the whole earth (global warming, climate change, extinction of species, planetary catastrophe)or landscapes, homelands and cities (polluting rivers and seas, fouling the air, felling trees and forests), there are poems here to alert and alarm anyone willing to read or listen. Other poems celebrate the rapidly vanishing natural world, or lament what has already been lost, or even find a glimmer of hope through efforts to conserve, recycle and rethink. Earth Shattering's words of warning include contributions from…
By showcasing the rich tradition of queer poets whose writing is inspired by nature, Queer Nature opens up the nature poetry genre.
It is the book I needed twenty years ago when I began writing poetry. In my search for queer role models I was happy to find Mary Oliver, Kay Ryan, and Elizabeth Bishop but little did I know how many others were hiding in plain sight. This expansive anthology presents up to 200 more poets from 150 years ago to the present day, with a moving introduction by editor Michael Walsh.
Funny, sad, complex, and direct; the poems explore exclusion and alienation as well as love and belonging. Above all else this anthology confirms that poetry is as boundless as nature and that together they belong to everyone.
An anthology of queer nature poetry spanning three centuries.
This anthology amplifies and centers LGBTQIA+ voices and perspectives in a collection of contemporary nature poetry. Showcasing over two hundred queer writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Queer Nature offers a new context for and expands upon the canon of nature poetry while also offering new lenses through which to view queerness and the natural world.
In the introduction, editor Michael Walsh writes that the anthology is "concerned with poems that speak to and about nature as the term is applied in everyday language to queer and trans bodies…
This is an exciting and important poetry anthology.
Spanning the history of black poetry in America, the editor Camille T. Dungy has collected one hundred and eighty poems by ninety-three poets. Her introduction radically enlarges the realm of eco-poetry as she considers the exclusion of African-American poets from the nature poetry genre while also exploring the complexity of their relationship with the land that witnessed or abetted centuries of racist subjugation.
Thought-provoking essays by Alice Walker, Marilyn Nelson, and others, introduce each of the ten sections in which I found a treasure trove of poets I’ve long admired, such as Rita Dove and Ross Gay, and poets I’ve never come across before, such as Kamilah Aisha Moon.
This book presents the natural world seen through the eyes of black poets. ""Black Nature"" is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated. Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry - anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the…
What’s distinctive about this gorgeous poetry anthology is not only that each poem has a specific tree or flower as its subject but that they are grouped according to plant family.
The editor Sarah Maguire was a gardener as well as a poet and translator. In what was clearly a labour of love she brought together poems from all over the world, spanning eight centuries of writing. Her fascinating introduction considers many aspects of nature poetry, including gender and colonialism.
As a gardener and poet I have loved finding poems by Medbh McGuckian, Emily Dickinson and D.H. Lawrence grouped together in the Gentian family or poems by Louise Glück, Seamus Heaney, Lorna Goodison, Robert Herrick, Marianne Moore, and Richard Wilbur thriving next to each other in the Mint family.
This new anthology is as entrancing as the lost gardens of Heligan - I cannot imagine an anthology anyone would enjoy more.' Ruth Padel, The IndependentThis beautifully compiled and designed anthology brings together over 250 poems about flowers, plants and trees from eight centuries of writing in English. Fourteenth-century lyrics sit next to poems of the twenty-first century; celebrations of plants native to the English soil share the volume with more exotic plant poetry from further afield, creating a cornucopia of intriguing juxtapositions. There are thirty poems about roses, by poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Dorothy Parker and the South…
My third collection is far-reaching and yet precisely rooted in time and place. Change reverberates through six sequences: my mother’s memory loss, my grandmother’s enduring influence, untold stories of Irish history and heritage, same-sex love from censorship to celebration, habitat destruction, and restoration in the Wicklow uplands. Unsentimental and tender, subtle and searingly truthful, these poems carry their emotional heft lightly. They explore the depth of our dependence on the natural world, drawing attention to the plants, birds, and animals that give meaning to our lives. Each poem is distinguished by the luminous language, vivid imagery, and musicality of the lines. There is a calm stillness at the heart of this collection which pays homage to our beautiful, fragile world.
I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.
Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…
This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.
One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…
