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Peter Abbs
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Eco-Poetry
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We seem t o be sleepwalking into a catastrophe of our own making
(Photo of Los Angeles: Associated Press;
photo of dumped car, USA :A. Dietrich/UNEP/Still P ictures)
Peter Abbs is deeply committed to an open and imaginative notion of eco-poetics. He has edited the first Anglo-American anthology of contemporary eco-poetry, Earth Songs . The poems in this anthology testify to the current violation of the natural order, but also affirm the diverse beauty of the earth.
In his preface Peter Abbs writes:
The earth is our home. It is where we have come from, the place where we live and have our being. We humans are extraordinary, symbol-makers and city builders, but we still belong with all the other diverse species in a complex web of connection and reciprocity. We are highly creative but, as our history shows, we are also perverse, dangerous and hugely destructive. And it would seem at the moment, mesmerised by the chimera of unending material progress, we are bent on desecrating our natural world and destroying ourselves with it...
Eco-poetics is born out of a sense of this impending disaster and has clear connections with both the Romantic movement and the long pastoral tradition in Western Culture. Its aim is to take the modern insights of ecology deep into the imagination.
The poet has to engage with the contending ideas that inform our understanding of time and matter, of biology and consciousness. We cannot disconnect poetry from philosophy, science and ecology, nor the historic moment which it is our fate to live.
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WHAT THE CRITICS SAY
This inspiring anthology offers a profound poetic representation of our age, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Jonathan Porritt
There's stunning poetry in every section of this anthology...It should have been national headlines! ... This is a must-buy for all poets .
Judy Gahagan in Ambit
Earth Songs is concerned with our battered but still beautiful planet and how humanity ought to live upon it... t he poems (all of a high standard) are full of living experience, observation and thought .
Anna Adams in Temenos Academic Review
Resurgence publishes outstanding earth poetry in its pages and this anthology brings together a wonderful collection .
Anita Roddick
It is a rich collection that is very good value for money and should make a useful set text .
Terry Gifford in Green Letters
To order Earth Songs www.greenbooks.co.uk
Peter Abbs
is also Poetry Editor of Resurgence
a magazine committed to the ecological www.resurgence.org
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Rough Country
Give me a landscape made of obstacles,
of steep hills and jutting glacial rock,
where the low-running streams are quick to flood
the grassy fields and bottomlands.
A place
no engineers can master - where the roads
must twist like tendrils up the mountainside
on narrow cliffs where boulders block the way.
Where tall black trunks of lightning-scalding pine
push through the tangled woods to make a roost
for hawks and swarming crows.
And sharp inclines
where twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush,
scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly
to find an unexpected waterfall,
not half a mile from the nearest road,
a spot so hard to reach that no one comes -
a hiding place, a shrine for dragon flies
and nesting jays, a sign that there is still
one piece of property that won't be owned.
Dana Gioia
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Bewick Swans Arrive at Ouse Washes
Just when I think winter has won,
a black book closing
on pages of light,
and the darkness sways on its haunches
like an impatient bear
scooping up silver minnows,
I sense an agitation in the sky,
long V's trailing like pennons.
Altocirrus, the swans are as white
as the tundra they come from.
Their cries multiply. Their bodies
crash-land on the water
star after star after star.
Lynne Wycherley
One way of defining eco-poetics:
the long tradition of pastoral poetry in extremis.
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Other Related Pages
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