"Poetry does not tamper with the world," as William Carlos Williams wrote, "but moves it." Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street's rich and generous The Ecopoetry Anthology offers 320 poems by 208 poets--praising songs, incantations, lists, elegies, rhapsodies, jeremiads--each in their very different ways bearing the power "to break through our dulled disregard, our carelessness, our despair, reawakening our sense of the vitality and beauty of nature."
Part one presents poets, from Walt Whitman to Denise Levertov, who predate the environmental revolution. Next come 176 contemporaries, from A.R. Ammons to Robert Wrigley. It's apropos that the first poem in this middle section is Ammons's seminal piece, "Corson's Inlet," where he observes nature as he walks along his Jersey Shore dunes: "in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of/ primrose/ more or less dispersed."
Fisher-Wirth and Street have done a superb job of providing works by both well-known and lesser known poets. Alongside such luminaries as W.S. Merwin, Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver, one can discover beautiful and moving pieces by Patrick Lawler, Davis McCombs or Annie Boutelle. Some readers may be disappointed at the absence of a favorite poem, but most of the "great" nature pieces of the modern era are here, including Galway Kinnell's overwhelming "The Bear," Robert Bly's moving prose poem "The Dead Seal" and Robert Hass's mini-epic "State of the Planet." Hass also provides a wise introduction, noting that The Ecopoetry Anthology reveals the ways our "nature poetry developed toward an ecopoetics, toward the necessity of imagining a livable earth." --Tom Lavoie, former publisher