Dunn, Sara (ed.); Alan Scholefield (ed);
Poetry for the Earth
Fawcett Columbine, 1992, 247 pages
ISBN 0449905993, 9780449905999
topics: | poetry | environment | nature | anthology
A passionate selection of poems dealing with the environment, not the pressing issues as such, but a "more localized view ... rooted in the immedicacy of the poets' external worlds." (p.xiii). The selection spans a broad range of poets from the Eskimo to Persia, and highlights many aspects of celebrating nature.
In many situations, the idealistic impetus makes for poor poetry, but in this instance, the passion works.
The poems are organized into seven sections, ranging from joy through loss and disillusion to philosophical acceptance and turbulence. The attempt to separate these into categories, while laudable, is a challenge because the categories are so porous.
* Celebration: the poets' joy of nature, like Pasternak's enchantment on the Steppe, Levertov leaping and laughing and stamping in the Spring, and Nazim Hikmet contemplating life under a sycamore (plane tree). * Loss: Ecuadorian poet Jorge Carrera Andrade laments the passing of farms where roosters trickled, Dorothy Parker doesn't find strange birds coming to her door, and Wendy Rose's epitaph on the native american way of life. * Anger: H.D. gasps for breath, and has had enough. African american poet Margaret Walker is unhappy in an apartment after the free-ranging life in a southern ranch... * Consolation: Some of the poems, like Ivor Gurney after the rain, could as well have been a celebration... * Contemplation: A more philosophical bent, like Theodore Roethke's ruminations on boundaries, sea and fresh water sound and silence, becoming and perishing. * Observation: Novelty and beauty and how it affects us, like medieval Chinese poet Hsu Ling's re-discovery of himself. * Disquiet: During times of war and upheaval, instability.
[trans. Richard McKane] We stand at the source, the plane tree and I. Our images reflect off the river. The water-dazzle lights up the plane tree and me. We stand at the source, the plane tree, me, and the cat. Our images reflect off the river. The water-dazzle lights up. the plane tree, me, and the cat. We stand at the source, the plane tree, me, the cat, and the sun. Our images reflect off the river. The water-dazzle lights up the plane tree, me, the cat, and the sun. We stand at the source, the plane tree, me, the cat, the sun, and our lives. Our images reflect off the river. The water-dazzle lights up the plane tree, me, the cat, the sun, and our lives. We stand at the source. The cat will be the first to go, its image in the water will dissolve. Then I will go, my image in the water will dissolve. Then the plane tree will go, its image in the water will dissolve. Then the river will go, the sun alone remaining, and then it, too, will go.
[trans. from Spanish by Muna Lee] p. 35 I was born in the century of the death of the rose when the motor had already driven out the angels. Quito watched the last stagecoach roll, and at its passing the trees ran by in good order, and the hedges and houses of the new parishes, on the threshold of the country where slow cows were ruminating the silence and the wind spurred its swift horses. My mother, clothed in the setting sun, put away her youth in a deep guitar, and only on certain evenings would she show it to her children, sheathed in music, light, and words. I loved the hydrography of the rain, the yellow fleas on the apple tree, and the toads that would sound from time to time their thick wooden bells. The great sail of air maneuvered endlessly. The cordillera was a shore of the sky. The storm would come, and at the drum-roll its drenched regiments would charge; but then the sun with its golden patrols would bring back translucent peace to the fields. I would watch men clasp the barley, horsemen sink into the sky, and the laden wagons with lowing oxen go down to the mango-fragrant coast. The valley was there with its farms where dawn touched off its trickle of roosters, and westward was the land where the sugarcane waved its peaceful banner, and the cacao held close in a coffer its secret fortune, and the pineapple girded on the fragrant cuirass, the nude banana her silken tunic. It has all passed in successive waves, as the vain foam-figures pass. The years go without haste entangling their lichens, and memory is scarcely a water-lily that lifts between two waters its drowned face. The guitar is only a coffin for songs, and the head-wounded cock laments. All the angels of the earth have emigrated, even the dark angel of the cacao tree.
Our skin loosely lies across grass borders; stones loading up are loaded down with placement sticks, a great tearing and appearance of holes. We are brought and divided into clay pots; we die on granite scaffolding on the shape of the Sierras and lie down with lips open thrusting songs on the world. Who are we and do we still live? The doctor asleep, says no. So outside of eternity we struggle until our blood has spread off our bodies and frayed the sunset edges. It’s our blood that gives you those southwestern skies. year after year we give, harpooned with hope, only to fall bouncing through the canyons, our songs decreasing with distance. I suckle coyotes and grieve. Wendy Rose [w] (born May 7, 1948) is a Hopi/Miwok writer. Much of her verse deals with her search for her personal identity as a Native American.
I never may turn the loop of a road Where sudden, ahead, the sea is Iying, But my heart drags down with an ancient load- My heart, that a second before was flying. I never behold the quivering rain- And sweeter the rain than a lover to me- But my heart is wild in my breast with pain; My heart, that was tapping contentedly. There's never a rose spreads new at my door Nor a strange bird crosses the moon at night But I know I have known its beauty before, And a terrible sorrow along with the sight. The look of a laurel tree birthed for May Or a sycamore bared for a new November Is as old and as sad as my furtherest day- What is it, what is it, I almost remember?
I have had enough. I gasp for breath. Every way ends, every road, every foot-path leads at last to the hill-crest -- then you retrace your steps, or find the same slope on the other side, precipitate. I have had enough -- border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies, herbs, sweet-cress. O for some sharp swish of a branch -- there is no scent of resin in this place, no taste of bark, of coarse weeds, aromatic, astringent -- only border on border of scented pinks. Have you seen fruit under cover that wanted light -- pears wadded in cloth, protected from the frost, melons, almost ripe, smothered in straw? Why not let the pears cling to the empty branch? All your coaxing will only make a bitter fruit -- let them cling, ripen of themselves, test their own worth, nipped, shrivelled by the frost, to fall at last but fair with a russet coat. Or the melon -- let it bleach yellow in the winter light, even tart to the taste -- it is better to taste of frost -- the exquisite frost -- than of wadding and of dead grass. For this beauty, beauty without strength, chokes out life. I want wind to break, scatter these pink-stalks, snap off their spiced heads, fling them about with dead leaves -- spread the paths with twigs, limbs broken off, trail great pine branches, hurled across the melon-patch, break pear and quince -- leave half-trees, torn, twisted but showing the fight was valiant. O to blot out this garden to forget, to find a new beauty in some terrible wind-tortured place.
My roots are deep in southern life; deeper than John Brown or Nat Turner or Robert Lee. I was sired and weaned in a tropic world. The palm tree and banana leaf, mango and coconut, breadfruit and rubber trees know me. Warm skies and gulf blue streams are in my blood. I belong with the smell of fresh pine, with the trail of coon, and the spring growth of wild onion. I am no hothouse bulb to be reared in steam-heated flats with the music of El and subway in my ears, walled in by steel and wood and brick far from the sky. I want the cotton fields, tobacco and the cane. I want to walk along with sacks of seed to drop in fallow ground. Restless music is in my heart and I am eager to be gone. O Southland, sorrow home, melody beating in my bone and blood! How long will the Klan of hate, the hounds and the chain gangs keep me from my own? African-American poet bio: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/walker/walker.htm poems: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/walker/onlinepoems.htm
The rain has come, and the earth must be very glad Of its moisture, and the made roads, all dust clad; It lets a veil down on the lucent dark, And not of any bright ground thing shows its spark. Tomorrow's gray morning will show cowparsley, Hung all with shining drops, and the river will be Duller because of the all soddenness of things, Till the skylark breaks his reluctance, hangs shaking, and sings.
I There are those to whom place is unimportant, But this place, where sea and fresh water meet, Is important- Where the hawks sway out into the wind, Without a single wingbeat, And the eagles sail low over the fir trees, And the gulls cry against the crows In the curved harbors, And the tide rises up against the grass Nibbled by ship and rabbits. A time for watching the tide, For the heron's hieratic fishing, For the sleepy cries of the towhee, The morning birds gone, the twittering finches, But still the flash of the kingfisher, the wingbeat of the scoter. The sun a ball of fire coming down over the water, The last geese crossing against the reflected afterlight, The moon retreating into a vague cloudshape To the cries of the owl, the eerie whooper. The old log subsides with the lessening waves, And there is silence. I sway outside myself Into the darkening currents, Into the small spillage of driftwood, The waters swirling past the tiny headlands. Was it here I wore a crown of birds for a moment While on a far point of the rocks The light heightened, and below, in a mist out of nowhere, The first rain gathered? IV I live with the rocks, their weeds, Their filmy fringes of green, their harsh Edges, their holes Cut by the sea-slime, far from the crash of the long swell, The oily, tar-laden walls Of the toppling waves, Where the salmon ease their way into the kelp beds, And the sea rearranges itself among the small islands. Near this rose, in this grove of sun-parched, wind-warped madronas, Among the half-dead trees, I came upon the true ease of myself, As if another man appeared out of the depths of my being, And I stood outside myself, Beyond becoming and perishing, A something wholly other, As if I swayed out on the wildest wave alive, And yet was still. And I rejoiced in being what I was: In the lilac change, the white reptilian calm, In the bird beyond the bough, the single one With all the air to greet him as he flies, The dolphin rising from the darkening waves; And in this rose, this rose in the sea-wind, Rooted in stone, keeping the whole of light, Gathering to itself sound and silence- Mine and the sea-wind's.
The road that I came by mounts eight thousand feet: The river that I crossed hangs a hundred fathoms. The brambles so thick that in summer one cannot pass! The snow so high that in winter one cannot climb! With branches that interlace Lung Valley is dark: Against cliffs that tower one's voice beats and echoes. I turn my head, and it seems only a dream That I ever lived in the streets of Hsien-yang.
Introduction
Kathleen Raine: 'The Very Leaves of the Acacia-Tree Are London' Nazim Hikmet: Fable of Fables [tr. Richard McKane] Langston Hughes: Dream Variation Uvavnuk: Moved Walt Whitman: from Song of Myself Hugh MacDiarmid: from Scottish Scene Boris Pasternak: Steppe Henry Thoreau: Low-Anchored Cloud Geoffrey Chaucer: from the Parliament of Fowls 'Abd Allah ibn al-Simak: The Garden Alden Nowlan: Sacrament Margaret Walker: My Mississippi Spring Denise Levertov: Spring in the Lowlands Olga Broumas: For Robbie Moore Praxilla: 'Most Beautiful of Things' Gerard Manley Hopkins: 'Repeat that, Repeat' John Clare: Pleasant Sounds William Cowper: from the Task, Book I Percy Bysshe Shelley: from Epipsychidion Sappho: 'Leave Krete and Come to this Holy Temple' Michael Drayton: from Poly-Olbion, the First Song Wendy Rose: Mount Saint Helens Loowit: An Indian Woman's Song Friedrich Holderlin: 'You Firmly Built Alps' William Wordsworth: Composed Upon Westminster Bridge Anne Wilson: from Teisa: A Descriptive Poem of the River Tees, Its Towns and Antiquities Abraham Cowley: A Paraphrase Upon the Tenth Epistle of the First Book of Horace Gerard Manley Hopkins: Inversnaid James Thomson: from The Seasons, Winter Basho: 'Year's End' W. H. Davies: A Bright Day
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Binsey Poplars Cassiano Ricardo: The Song of the Wild Dove Dorothy Parker: Temps Perdu Ahmad 'Abd al Mu'ti Hijazi: Caption to a Landscape Janice Gould: Dispossessed Jorge Carrera Andrade: Biography for the Use of the Birds Margaret Walker: October Journey Anon [Medieval Latin]: from the Cambridge Songs Wendy Rose: Long Division: A Tribal History Claude McKay: The Tropics in New York John Clare: Enclosure Virgil: Pastoral I Michael Drayton: from Pastoralls, the Fourth Eglogue Adrienne Rich: Study of History Douris: Ephesos Elizabeth Weston: Concerning the Flooding of Prague After Constant Rains George Awoonor-Williams: The Sea Eats the Land at Home John Ceiriog Hughes: The Mountain Stream Anon [Innuit]: 'Far Inland' W. S. Graham: Loch Thom
Helen Dunmore: Ploughing the Roughlands Wendell Berry: 'I Go from the Woods' Stevie Smith: Alone in the Woods Tom Murray: Cutting a Track to Cardwell Charlotte Mew: The Trees are Down Elizabeth Carter: To a Gentleman, on His Intending to Cut Down a Grove to Enlarge His Prospect Norman Nicholson: The Elm Decline Alexander Pope: from An Essay on Man Andrew Marvell: The Mower Against Gardens Stevie Smith: 'I Love the English Country Scene' H. D.: Sheltered Garden Patrick Magill: from Padding It Charles Cotton: from the Wonders of the Peake Maria Logan: Verses on Hearing that an Airy and Pleasant Situation, Near a Populous and Commercial Town, Was Surrounded with New Buildings Ernesto Cardenal: New Ecology Anna Seward: from Colebrook Dale Marion Bernstein: A Song of Glasgow Town Juvenal: from Satire III Margaret Walker: Sorrow Home Thadious M. Davis: 'Honeysuckle was the Saddest Odor of All, I Think' R. S. Thomas: Autumn on the Land Sylvia Plath: Green Rock, Winthrop Bay Sheenagh Pugh: After I Came Back from Iceland Terri Meyette: Celebration 1982 Martyn Crucefix: Mikhael at Viksjon
John Clare: Come Hither Claude McKay: After the Winter W. B. Yeats: The Lake Isle of Innisfree Charlotte Bronte: Speak of the North Frances Bellerby: Plash Mill, Under the Moor Rainer Maria Rilke: Early Spring Anna Akhmatova: Tashkent Breaks into Blossom Anna Akhmatova: 'Everything is Plundered ...' Mieczyslaw Jastrun: Beyond Time Anon [Innuit]: Delight in Nature John Keats: On the Grasshopper and Cricket Byron: from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Kathleen Raine: Heirloom Paula Gunn Allen: Kopis'taya Joyce Isabel Lee: Granite Call Charles Tomlinson: The Marl Pits Yuan Chieh: Stone Fish Lake William Barnes: Trees be Company William Drummond: 'Thrise Happie Hee, Who by some Shadie Grove' John Milton: from Paradise Lost, Book IV Mary Leapor: A Summer's Wish Lenrie Peters: Autumn Burns Me Henry Thoreau: Within the Circuit of this Plodding Life Ivor Gurney: The Soaking Edward Thomas: Digging Po Chu-I: Planting Bamboos Anyte: 'Lounge in the Shade of the Luxuriant Laurel's'
Theodore Roethke: The Rose Pat Lowther: Coast Range Po Chu-I: Having Climbed to the Topmost Peak of the Incense-Burner Mountain Sylvia Plath: Above the Oxbow Elizabeth Bishop: Lesson VI, Lesson X Rosemary Dobson: Dry River Molly Holden: So which is the Truth? Liz Lochhead: Inner Pablo Neruda: Oh Earth, wait for Me Emily Dickinson: "'Nature" is what We See' Goethe: Epir Rhema Rose Flint: Connections Anne Finch: A Nocturnal Reverie Elinor Wylie: Wild Peaches Gillian Allnut: Sunart Ralph Waldo Emerson: Hamatreya J. Kitchener Davies: From the Sound of the Wind that is Blowing Charles Tomlinson: At Stoke Czeslaw Milosz: Advice Amy Clampitt: The Reedbeds of the Hackensack Molly Holden: Pieces of Unprofitable Land Mary Ursula Bethell: Pause Sheenagh Pugh: Geography 2 Alice Walker: On Sight Angelina Weld Grimke: The Black Finger Adrienne Rich: Rural Reflections Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Lachesis Lapponica Sylvia Plath: Two Campers in Cloud Country Wallace Stevens: This Solitude of Cataracts
Hsu Ling: The Waters of Lung-T'ou Norman MacCaig: Signs and Signals Les A. Murray: The Gum Forest, from Four Gaelic Poems Emily Dickinson: 'Blazing in Gold' John Pepper Clark: Ibadan C. P. Cavafy: Morning Sea Eldred Revett: Land-Schap Between Two Hills dsh: Concrete Poem 240663 Elizabeth Bishop: The Bight Elizabeth Coatsworth: Whale at Twilight R. S. Thomas: Night and Morning Pablo Neruda: The Night in Isla Negra Tomas Transtromer: from March '79 Alice Sadongei: What Frank, Martha and I know about the Desert Anon [Yoruba]: Riddles Anon [Mudbara]: 'The Day Breaks' Rosario Morales: Robles, M'Hija, Robles! Robert Bly: Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River Gary Snyder: The Trail is not a Trail Olga Broumas: Roadside Seamus Heaney: The Road at Frosses Emily Dickinson: 'As Imper Ceptibly as Grief' Laury Wells: The Nomads Edith Sodergran: Nocturne Anon [Ewe]: The Sky
Ruth Fainlight: The Power Source Gillian Clarke: Neighbours Helen Dunmore: Permafrost Anna Akhmatova: 'Distance Collapsed in Rubble' Seamus Heaney: Augury Alden Nowlan: St John River Michael Hamburger: A Dream of Water Liz Lochhead: What the Pool Said, on Midsummer's Day Stevie Smith: The River God U. A. Fanthorpe: Rising Damp Ray A. Young Bear: The Reason Why I am Afraid Even Though I am a Fisherman Raymond Carver: The River Andrew Young: The Fear Frances Horovitz: Winter Woods Frances Horovitz: Walking in Autumn Stevie Smith: Out of Time Emily Dickinson: 'There's A Certain Slant of Light' Denise Levertov: Over Heard Over S. E. Asia Antoni Malczewski: Open Spaces W. S. Rendra: Twilight View David Jones: From in Parenthesis Ruth Fainlight: The Field Mahmud Darwish: We Are Entitled to Love Autumn Antonio Machado: Today's Meditation Hugh MacDiarmid: One of These Days Lavinia Greenlaw: The Recital of Lost Cities Charlotte Mew: Domus Caedet Arborem James Thomson: From the City of Dreadful Night Alfonsina Storni: Men in the City Margaret Atwood: A Holiday Issa: 'Never Forget' Elaine Feinstein: By the Cam George Crabbe: from The Poor of the Borough, Letter XXII, Peter Grimes Thomas Hardy: Night-Time in Mid-Fall John Milton: from Paradise Lost, Book II James Thomson: from the Seasons, Summer Kwesi Brew: The Dry Season Robert Penn Warren: Summer Storm (Circa 1916), and God's Grace King James Bible: Jeremiah 4, 23-28 Nina Cassian: And When Summer Comes to an End ...
The poetic concern for nature has been, in the words of Anna Akhmatova, "wild in our breast for centuries." Now, Poetry for the Earth collects an astonishing diversity of poetic response to the environment, from eras and places as diverse as classical Greece, Elizabethan England, seventeenth-century Japan, contemporary Africa, and modern America. In moods that range from urgent to contemplative, euphoric to indignant" "Even as these poets celebrate the vivid glories of the earth, their work is streaked with unease and fury. "Gold-empurpled autumn" and fierce leaping salmon give way to frosted marshes awaiting the ravage of war. London's sunlit mornings and haunting rain-slick nights contrast with the befouled rivers of Nicaragua and the noise and filth of ancient Rome." "From haiku and tribal riddles to blank verse, these poems speak anew to a relationship in crisis, propelling us all toward appreciation and reflection of the planet that gives us life. - Book jacket.