The Ecopoetry Anthology - by Ann Fisher-Wirth & Laura-Gray Street (Paperback)

About the Book

The most comprehensive collection yet of American poetry about nature and the environment

Book Synopsis

Definitive and daring, The Ecopoetry Anthology is the authoritative collection of contemporary American poetry about nature and the environment--in all its glory and challenge. From praise to lament, the work covers the range of human response to an increasingly complex and often disturbing natural world and inquires of our human place in a vastness beyond the human.

To establish the antecedents of today's writing, The Ecopoetry Anthology presents a historical section that includes poetry written from roughly the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Iconic American poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are followed by more modern poets like Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and even more recent foundational work by poets like Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, and Muriel Rukeyser. With subtle discernment, the editors portray our country's rich heritage and dramatic range of writing about the natural world around us.

Review Quotes

"The Ecopoetry Anthology is an impressive collection of poetry that has succeeded in inclusively and impressively nudging the dial further toward collecting, understanding, and redefining the interaction of poetry, poets, and the natural world." -- Terrain.org

"Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street's rich and generous The Ecopoetry Anthology... Here is bounty indeed--an innovative anthology drawing upon 150 years of American poetry about nature, animals and our precious environment." -- Shelf Awareness

"Ravishing, devastating, and uplifting, this is a mighty, conscionable, and defining anthology of vital poetry shaped by profound environmental intelligence." -- Booklist

"The Ecopoetry Anthology is a beautifully constructed, carefully planned, and intelligently framed volume." -- Colorado Review

"Impressive in the scope and diversity of poets included, The Ecopoetry Anthology is poised to become the definitive anthology of American ecopoetry." -- ISLE Journal

"I've always thought poetry could change the world, and with the best energies of Robert Hass, Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, and these assembled poets, I believe we have a chance."-- Washington Independent Review of Books

"The strength of The Ecopoetry Anthology is in its companionable, earthbound perspective, poem after poem. Cutting a broad swath from "the natural history of tears" (Peter Gizzi) to "surreal/popcorn surrounded by the reborn" (Jack Collom), the editors have assembled, with curatorial finesse, a genuine constellation of feisty, testy, funny, worried, disconcerted, perplexed, grieving, and roaring poems."-- Chicago Review

"Poetry might not derail the course we're on, but the poems gathered here just might soothe what ails us." -- Rain Taxi

"Puts traditional nature poetry in conversation with the ecocentric avantgarde."
-- American Poetry Review

"A definitive new collection of poems about nature and environment." -- Orion

About the Author

Ann Fisher-Wirth is the author of the poetry books Blue Window, Five Terraces, Carta Marina, and Dream Cabinet; the chapbook Slide Shows; and William Carlos Williams an Autobiography: The Woods of His Own Nature. Her awards include the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Rita Dove Poetry Award, two Mississippi Arts Commission Poetry fellowships, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize. She teaches in the English Department at the University of Mississippi, where she also directs the minor in environmental studies.