Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

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Can Poetry Save the Earth? ...

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Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems JOHN FELSTINER Yale University Press New Haven & London ...

Color gallery courtesy Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts. Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial F ...

For our next generations Sarah and Scobie and Brayden Alek and Camellia ...

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Contents List of Illustrations xi Preface The Poetry of Earth Is Never Dead xiii Introduction Care in Such a World 1 PA RT O N E ...

viii CONTENTS “Nature was naked, and I was also” Adamic Walt Whitman 64 “Earth’s most graphic transaction” Syllables of Emily Di ...

CONTENTS ix “submerged shafts of the / / sun, / split like spun / glass” Marianne Moore’s Fantastic Reverence 176 “There, there ...

x CONTENTS “that the rock might see” News of the North from John Haines 282 “asking for my human breath” Trust in Maxine Kumin 2 ...

xi Illustrations Scared Buffalo Black and white God creating the birds sees Adam in His thought Western Wind Dorothy Wordsworth ...

xii ILLUSTRATIONS May Swenson 247 Denise Levertov, “An English Field in the Nuclear Age” 270 Alaskan Glacier 283 Building the Ho ...

xiii Preface The Poetry of Earth Is Never Dead The young John Keats coined this line in 1816. Since then the poetry of earth has ...

xiv PREFACE household, frugal vehicle, recycling drive, communal garden, or local business going green, to an active concern for ...

1 Introduction Care in Such a World My words are tied in one With the great mountains With the great rocks With the great trees ...

2 INTRODUCTION humankind, male and female created alike. God blessed them, that they should “Be fruitful” and not only “replenis ...

CARE IN SUCH A WORLD 3 glazed with rain water beside the white chickens What and how much depends on this barrow, on rain and ch ...

4 INTRODUCTION Shakespeare ’s sonnet likens the sea to our lives, one line to the next, Like as the waves make towards the pebbl ...

CARE IN SUCH A WORLD 5 to the eddies of the wind”—the other nimble, skeptical: “Touch lightly Na- ture ’s sweet Guitar / Unless ...