The Friday Poem
A poem every Friday
Out of Time — Poetry from the Climate Emergency (Valley Press, 2021, edited by Kate Simpson) features original work from Caroline Bird, Inua Ellams, Pascale Petit, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Rachael Allen, Raymond Antrobus and Mary Jean Chan, among others. Tom Chivers of Penned in the Margins says “Out of Time presents an excoriating critique of Earth’s ongoing encounter with humankind – the language animal – in …
100 Poems to Save the Earth (Seren, 2021, edited by Zoe Brigley) begs the question how, exactly, poetry can save the world? Writing from rural and urban perspectives, linking issues of social injustice with the need to protect the environment, contemporary poets from Britain, Ireland, America and beyond suggests that poetry can act as a wake-up call, that it …
The Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry is a major international award for ecopoetry, funded by the Edward Goldsmith Foundation and organised by the Poetry School. Every year, the competition awards £8,000 in prize money, provides writers’ residencies for the winners, and supports the development of eco-poetry through a programme of free workshops, and a series of incisive essays …
A Resurgence Anthology of contemporary eco-poetry (Green Books, 2002, edited by Peter Abbs) was the first major anthology of contemporary eco-poetry. It offers a wide-ranging collection of poems taken from the pages of Resurgence Magazine with contributions from Wendell Berry, Sujata Bhatt, Gillian Clarke and Seamus Heaney, among others. The poems celebrate wildlife, the seasons, wilderness, and the way in which our lives are in constant creative or destructive play with the whole of nature.
Inspired by the fortieth anniversary of Rachel Carson’s controversial and prophetic book ‘Silent Spring’, which warned against the indiscriminate use of pesticides and its consequences for the environment, and for us. The anthology features poems commissioned from leading poets including Seamus Heaney and Andrew Motion, as well as work from a number of American eco-poets.
The Thunder Mutters: 101 poems for the planet (Faber, 2006, edited by Alice Oswald) begins with Oswald’s dedication to the rake — “an age-old implement which connects the earth to our hands, and the landscape with the sky.” She chooses 101 poems which map the border between the personal and natural worlds and include poems by Robert …
Earth Shattering ecopoems (Bloodaxe, 2007, edited by Neil Astley) ranges far and wide, from the wilderness poetry of ancient China to 21st-century native American poetry, with postcolonial and feminist perspectives represented by writers such as Derek Walcott, Ernesto Cardinal, Oodgeroo and Susan Griffin. The poems demonstrate the dangers and poverty of a world cut off from …
Feature: Lyric Essay / Autism / Nature / Around Me / The Lakes
by Jane Burn
