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Green poetry

A passionate selection of poems dealing with the environment, not the pressing issues as such, but a "more localized view ... rooted in the immedicacy of the poets' external worlds." (p.xiii). The selection spans a broad range of poets from the Eskimo to Persia, and highlights many aspects of celebrating nature.

In many situations, the idealistic impetus makes for poor poetry, but in this instance, the passion works.

The poems are organized into seven sections, ranging from joy through loss and disillusion to philosophical acceptance and turbulence. The attempt to separate these into categories, while laudable, is a challenge because the categories are so porous.

  * Celebration: the poets' joy of nature, like Pasternak's
  	     enchantment on the Steppe, Levertov leaping and
  	     laughing and stamping in the Spring, and Nazim Hikmet
  	     contemplating life under a sycamore (plane tree).
  * Loss: Ecuadorian poet Jorge Carrera Andrade laments the passing
  	     of farms where roosters trickled, Dorothy Parker doesn't find
  	     strange birds coming to her door, and Wendy Rose's epitaph on
  	     the native american way of life.
  * Anger: H.D. gasps for breath, and has had enough.  African
  	     american poet Margaret Walker is unhappy in an apartment after
  	     the free-ranging life in a southern ranch...
  * Consolation: Some of the poems, like Ivor Gurney after
  	     the rain, could as well have been a celebration...
  * Contemplation:  A more philosophical bent, like Theodore
  	     Roethke's ruminations on boundaries, sea and fresh water
  	     sound and silence, becoming and perishing.
  * Observation: Novelty and beauty and how it affects us, like
  	     medieval Chinese poet Hsu Ling's re-discovery of himself.
  * Disquiet: During times of war and upheaval, instability.

Nazim Hikmet (Turkey 1903-1962): Fable of Fables

			  [trans. Richard McKane]

	We stand at the source,
	the plane tree and I.
	Our images reflect
	off the river.
	The water-dazzle
	lights up the plane tree and me.

	We stand at the source,
	the plane tree, me, and the cat.
	Our images reflect
	off the river.
	The water-dazzle
	lights up. the plane tree, me, and the cat.

	We stand at the source,
	the plane tree, me, the cat, and the sun.
	Our images reflect
	off the river.
	The water-dazzle
	lights up the plane tree, me, the cat, and the sun.

	We stand at the source,
	the plane tree, me, the cat, the sun, and our lives.
	Our images reflect
	off the river.
	The water-dazzle
	lights up the plane tree, me, the cat, the sun, and our lives.

	We stand at the source.
	The cat will be the first to go,
	its image in the water will dissolve.
	Then I will go,
	my image in the water will dissolve.
	Then the plane tree will go,
	its image in the water will dissolve.
	Then the river will go,
	the sun alone remaining,
	and then it, too, will go.

Jorge Carrera Andrade: Biography for the use of the birds

			[trans. from Spanish by Muna Lee] p. 35

	I was born in the century of the death of the rose
	when the motor had already driven out the angels.
	Quito watched the last stagecoach roll,
	and at its passing the trees ran by in good order,
	and the hedges and houses of the new parishes,
	on the threshold of the country
	where slow cows were ruminating the silence
	and the wind spurred its swift horses.
	My mother, clothed in the setting sun,
	put away her youth in a deep guitar,
	and only on certain evenings would she show it to her children,
	sheathed in music, light, and words.
	I loved the hydrography of the rain,
	the yellow fleas on the apple tree,
	and the toads that would sound from time to time
	their thick wooden bells.
	The great sail of air maneuvered endlessly.
	The cordillera was a shore of the sky.
	The storm would come, and at the drum-roll
	its drenched regiments would charge;
	but then the sun with its golden patrols
	would bring back translucent peace to the fields.
	I would watch men clasp the barley,
	horsemen sink into the sky,
	and the laden wagons with lowing oxen
	go down to the mango-fragrant coast.
	The valley was there with its farms
	where dawn touched off its trickle of roosters,
	and westward was the land where the sugarcane
	waved its peaceful banner, and the cacao
	held close in a coffer its secret fortune,
	and the pineapple girded on the fragrant cuirass,
	the nude banana her silken tunic.
	It has all passed in successive waves,
	as the vain foam-figures pass.
	The years go without haste entangling their lichens,
	and memory is scarcely a water-lily
	that lifts between two waters
	its drowned face.
	The guitar is only a coffin for songs,
	and the head-wounded cock laments.
	All the angels of the earth have emigrated,
	even the dark angel of the cacao tree.

Wendy Rose: Long Division – A Tribal History

	Our skin loosely lies
	across grass borders;
	stones loading up
	are loaded down with placement sticks,
	a great tearing
	and appearance of holes.

	We are brought and divided
	into clay pots; we die
	on granite scaffolding
	on the shape of the Sierras
	and lie down with lips open
	thrusting songs on the world.

	Who are we and do we
	still live?  The doctor
	asleep, says no.

	So outside of eternity
	we struggle until our blood has spread off our bodies
	and frayed the sunset edges.

	It’s our blood that gives you
	those southwestern skies.
	year after year we give,
	harpooned with hope, only to fall
	bouncing through the canyons,
	our songs decreasing
	with distance.

	I suckle coyotes
	and grieve.

Wendy Rose [w] (born May 7, 1948) is a Hopi/Miwok writer.  Much of her
verse deals with her search for her personal identity as a Native
American.

Dorothy Parker: Temps Perdu

I never may turn the loop of a road
Where sudden, ahead, the sea is Iying,
But my heart drags down with an ancient load-
My heart, that a second before was flying.

I never behold the quivering rain-
And sweeter the rain than a lover to me-
But my heart is wild in my breast with pain;
My heart, that was tapping contentedly.

There's never a rose spreads new at my door
Nor a strange bird crosses the moon at night
But I know I have known its beauty before,
And a terrible sorrow along with the sight.

The look of a laurel tree birthed for May
Or a sycamore bared for a new November
Is as old and as sad as my furtherest day-
What is it, what is it, I almost remember?

H.D. : Sheltered Garden

    I have had enough.
    I gasp for breath.

    Every way ends, every road,
    every foot-path leads at last
    to the hill-crest --
    then you retrace your steps,
    or find the same slope on the other side,
    precipitate.

    I have had enough --
    border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies,
    herbs, sweet-cress.

    O for some sharp swish of a branch --
    there is no scent of resin
    in this place,
    no taste of bark, of coarse weeds,
    aromatic, astringent --
    only border on border of scented pinks.

    Have you seen fruit under cover
    that wanted light --
    pears wadded in cloth,
    protected from the frost,
    melons, almost ripe,
    smothered in straw?

    Why not let the pears cling
    to the empty branch?
    All your coaxing will only make
    a bitter fruit --
    let them cling, ripen of themselves,
    test their own worth,
    nipped, shrivelled by the frost,
    to fall at last but fair
    with a russet coat.

    Or the melon --
    let it bleach yellow
    in the winter light,
    even tart to the taste --
    it is better to taste of frost --
    the exquisite frost --
    than of wadding and of dead grass.

    For this beauty,
    beauty without strength,
    chokes out life.
    I want wind to break,
    scatter these pink-stalks,
    snap off their spiced heads,
    fling them about with dead leaves --
    spread the paths with twigs,
    limbs broken off,
    trail great pine branches,
    hurled across the melon-patch,
    break pear and quince --
    leave half-trees, torn, twisted
    but showing the fight was valiant.

    O to blot out this garden
    to forget, to find a new beauty
    in some terrible
    wind-tortured place.

Margaret Walker: Sorrow Home

    My roots are deep in southern life; deeper than John Brown
            or Nat Turner or Robert Lee. I was sired and weaned
            in a tropic world. The palm tree and banana leaf,
            mango and coconut, breadfruit and rubber trees know
            me.

    Warm skies and gulf blue streams are in my blood. I belong
            with the smell of fresh pine, with the trail of coon, and
            the spring growth of wild onion.

    I am no hothouse bulb to be reared in steam-heated flats
            with the music of El and subway in my ears, walled in
            by steel and wood and brick far from the sky.

    I want the cotton fields, tobacco and the cane. I want to
            walk along with sacks of seed to drop in fallow ground.
            Restless music is in my heart and I am eager to be
            gone.

    O Southland, sorrow home, melody beating in my bone and
            blood! How long will the Klan of hate, the hounds and
            the chain gangs keep me from my own?

African-American poet
bio: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/walker/walker.htm
poems: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/walker/onlinepoems.htm

Ivor Gurney: The Soaking

    The rain has come, and the earth must be very glad
    Of its moisture, and the made roads, all dust clad;
    It lets a veil down on the lucent dark,
    And not of any bright ground thing shows its spark.

    Tomorrow's gray morning will show cowparsley,
    Hung all with shining drops, and the river will be
    Duller because of the all soddenness of things,
    Till the skylark breaks his reluctance, hangs shaking, and sings.

Theodore Roethke: The Rose

			I
	There are those to whom place is unimportant,
	But this place, where sea and fresh water meet,
	Is important-
	Where the hawks sway out into the wind,
	Without a single wingbeat,
	And the eagles sail low over the fir trees,
	And the gulls cry against the crows
	In the curved harbors,
	And the tide rises up against the grass
	Nibbled by ship and rabbits.
	A time for watching the tide,
	For the heron's hieratic fishing,
	For the sleepy cries of the towhee,
	The morning birds gone, the twittering finches,
	But still the flash of the kingfisher, the wingbeat of the scoter.
	The sun a ball of fire coming down over the water,
	The last geese crossing against the reflected afterlight,
	The moon retreating into a vague cloudshape
	To the cries of the owl, the eerie whooper.
	The old log subsides with the lessening waves,
	And there is silence.
	I sway outside myself
	Into the darkening currents,
	Into the small spillage of driftwood,
	The waters swirling past the tiny headlands.
	Was it here I wore a crown of birds for a moment
	While on a far point of the rocks
	The light heightened, and below, in a mist out of nowhere,
	The first rain gathered?

			IV
	I live with the rocks, their weeds,
	Their filmy fringes of green, their harsh
	Edges, their holes
	Cut by the sea-slime, far from the crash of the long swell,
	The oily, tar-laden walls
	Of the toppling waves,
	Where the salmon ease their way into the kelp beds,
	And the sea rearranges itself among the small islands.
	Near this rose, in this grove of sun-parched, wind-warped madronas,
	Among the half-dead trees,
	I came upon the true ease of myself,
	As if another man appeared out of the depths of my being,
	And I stood outside myself,
	Beyond becoming and perishing,
	A something wholly other,
	As if I swayed out on the wildest wave alive,
	And yet was still.
	And I rejoiced in being what I was:
	In the lilac change, the white reptilian calm,
	In the bird beyond the bough, the single one
	With all the air to greet him as he flies,
	The dolphin rising from the darkening waves;
	And in this rose, this rose in the sea-wind,
	Rooted in stone, keeping the whole of light,
	Gathering to itself sound and silence-
	Mine and the sea-wind's.

Hsu Ling: The Waters of Lung-T'ou

The road that I came by mounts eight thousand feet:
The river that I crossed hangs a hundred fathoms.
The brambles so thick that in summer one cannot pass!
The snow so high that in winter one cannot climb!
With branches that interlace Lung Valley is dark:
Against cliffs that tower one's voice beats and echoes.
I turn my head, and it seems only a dream
That I ever lived in the streets of Hsien-yang.

Contents

Introduction

CELEBRATION: 'So I shake with joy'

    Kathleen Raine:           'The Very Leaves of the Acacia-Tree Are London'
    Nazim Hikmet:             Fable of Fables  [tr. Richard McKane]
    Langston Hughes:          Dream Variation
    Uvavnuk:                  Moved
    Walt Whitman:             from Song of Myself
    Hugh MacDiarmid:          from Scottish Scene
    Boris Pasternak:          Steppe
    Henry Thoreau:            Low-Anchored Cloud
    Geoffrey Chaucer:         from the Parliament of Fowls
    'Abd Allah ibn al-Simak:  The Garden
    Alden Nowlan:             Sacrament
    Margaret Walker:          My Mississippi Spring
    Denise Levertov:          Spring in the Lowlands
    Olga Broumas:             For Robbie Moore
    Praxilla:                 'Most Beautiful of Things'
    Gerard Manley Hopkins:    'Repeat that, Repeat'
    John Clare:               Pleasant Sounds
    William Cowper:           from the Task, Book I
    Percy Bysshe Shelley:     from Epipsychidion
    Sappho:                   'Leave Krete and Come to this Holy Temple'
    Michael Drayton:          from Poly-Olbion, the First Song
    Wendy Rose:               Mount Saint Helens Loowit: An Indian Woman's Song
    Friedrich Holderlin:      'You Firmly Built Alps'
    William Wordsworth:       Composed Upon Westminster Bridge
    Anne Wilson:              from Teisa: A Descriptive Poem of the River Tees, Its Towns and Antiquities
    Abraham Cowley:           A Paraphrase Upon the Tenth Epistle of the First Book of Horace
    Gerard Manley Hopkins:    Inversnaid
    James Thomson:            from The Seasons, Winter
    Basho:                    'Year's End'
    W. H. Davies:             A Bright Day

LOSS: 'Lament for all that is purple like dusk'

    Gerard Manley Hopkins:    Binsey Poplars
    Cassiano Ricardo:         The Song of the Wild Dove
    Dorothy Parker:           Temps Perdu
    Ahmad 'Abd al Mu'ti Hijazi:       Caption to a Landscape
    Janice Gould:             Dispossessed
    Jorge Carrera Andrade:    Biography for the Use of the Birds
    Margaret Walker:          October Journey
    Anon [Medieval Latin]:    from the Cambridge Songs
    Wendy Rose:               Long Division: A Tribal History
    Claude McKay:             The Tropics in New York
    John Clare:               Enclosure
    Virgil:                   Pastoral I
    Michael Drayton:          from Pastoralls, the Fourth Eglogue
    Adrienne Rich:            Study of History
    Douris:                   Ephesos
    Elizabeth Weston:         Concerning the Flooding of Prague After Constant Rains
    George Awoonor-Williams:  The Sea Eats the Land at Home
    John Ceiriog Hughes:      The Mountain Stream
    Anon [Innuit]:            'Far Inland'
    W. S. Graham:             Loch Thom

ANGER: 'A perpetual/sour October'

    Helen Dunmore:            Ploughing the Roughlands
    Wendell Berry:            'I Go from the Woods'
    Stevie Smith:             Alone in the Woods
    Tom Murray:               Cutting a Track to Cardwell
    Charlotte Mew:            The Trees are Down
    Elizabeth Carter:         To a Gentleman, on His Intending to Cut Down a Grove to Enlarge His Prospect
    Norman Nicholson:         The Elm Decline
    Alexander Pope:           from An Essay on Man
    Andrew Marvell:           The Mower Against Gardens
    Stevie Smith:             'I Love the English Country Scene'
    H. D.:                    Sheltered Garden
    Patrick Magill:           from Padding It
    Charles Cotton:           from the Wonders of the Peake
    Maria Logan:              Verses on Hearing that an Airy and Pleasant Situation, Near a Populous and Commercial Town, Was Surrounded with New Buildings
    Ernesto Cardenal:         New Ecology
    Anna Seward:              from Colebrook Dale
    Marion Bernstein:         A Song of Glasgow Town
    Juvenal:                  from Satire III
    Margaret Walker:          Sorrow Home
    Thadious M. Davis:        'Honeysuckle was the Saddest Odor of All, I Think'
    R. S. Thomas:             Autumn on the Land
    Sylvia Plath:             Green Rock, Winthrop Bay
    Sheenagh Pugh:            After I Came Back from Iceland
    Terri Meyette:            Celebration 1982
    Martyn Crucefix:          Mikhael at Viksjon

CONSOLATION: 'Moments of an azure hue'

    John Clare:               Come Hither
    Claude McKay:             After the Winter
    W. B. Yeats:              The Lake Isle of Innisfree
    Charlotte Bronte:         Speak of the North
    Frances Bellerby:         Plash Mill, Under the Moor
    Rainer Maria Rilke:       Early Spring
    Anna Akhmatova:           Tashkent Breaks into Blossom
    Anna Akhmatova:           'Everything is Plundered ...'
    Mieczyslaw Jastrun:       Beyond Time
    Anon [Innuit]:            Delight in Nature
    John Keats:               On the Grasshopper and Cricket
    Byron:                    from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
    Kathleen Raine:           Heirloom
    Paula Gunn Allen:         Kopis'taya
    Joyce Isabel Lee:         Granite Call
    Charles Tomlinson:        The Marl Pits
    Yuan Chieh:               Stone Fish Lake
    William Barnes:           Trees be Company
    William Drummond:         'Thrise Happie Hee, Who by some Shadie Grove'
    John Milton:              from Paradise Lost, Book IV
    Mary Leapor:              A Summer's Wish
    Lenrie Peters:            Autumn Burns Me
    Henry Thoreau:            Within the Circuit of this Plodding Life
    Ivor Gurney:              The Soaking
    Edward Thomas:            Digging
    Po Chu-I:                 Planting Bamboos
    Anyte:                    'Lounge in the Shade of the Luxuriant Laurel's'

CONTEMPLATION: 'How can you realise the wideness of the world?'

    Theodore Roethke:         The Rose
    Pat Lowther:              Coast Range
    Po Chu-I:                 Having Climbed to the Topmost Peak of the Incense-Burner Mountain
    Sylvia Plath:             Above the Oxbow
    Elizabeth Bishop:         Lesson VI, Lesson X
    Rosemary Dobson:          Dry River
    Molly Holden:             So which is the Truth?
    Liz Lochhead:             Inner
    Pablo Neruda:             Oh Earth, wait for Me
    Emily Dickinson:          "'Nature" is what We See'
    Goethe:                   Epir Rhema
    Rose Flint:               Connections
    Anne Finch:               A Nocturnal Reverie
    Elinor Wylie:             Wild Peaches
    Gillian Allnut:           Sunart
    Ralph Waldo Emerson:      Hamatreya
    J. Kitchener Davies:      From the Sound of the Wind that is Blowing
    Charles Tomlinson:        At Stoke
    Czeslaw Milosz:           Advice
    Amy Clampitt:             The Reedbeds of the Hackensack
    Molly Holden:             Pieces of Unprofitable Land
    Mary Ursula Bethell:      Pause
    Sheenagh Pugh:            Geography 2
    Alice Walker:             On Sight
    Angelina Weld Grimke:     The Black Finger
    Adrienne Rich:            Rural Reflections
    Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Lachesis Lapponica
    Sylvia Plath:             Two Campers in Cloud Country
    Wallace Stevens:          This Solitude of Cataracts

OBSERVATION: 'Sensitive to the millionth of a flicker'

    Hsu Ling:                 The Waters of Lung-T'ou
    Norman MacCaig:           Signs and Signals
    Les A. Murray:            The Gum Forest, from Four Gaelic Poems
    Emily Dickinson:          'Blazing in Gold'
    John Pepper Clark:        Ibadan
    C. P. Cavafy:             Morning Sea
    Eldred Revett:            Land-Schap Between Two Hills
    dsh:                      Concrete Poem 240663
    Elizabeth Bishop:         The Bight
    Elizabeth Coatsworth:     Whale at Twilight
    R. S. Thomas:             Night and Morning
    Pablo Neruda:             The Night in Isla Negra
    Tomas Transtromer:        from March '79
    Alice Sadongei:           What Frank, Martha and I know about the Desert
    Anon [Yoruba]:            Riddles
    Anon [Mudbara]:           'The Day Breaks'
    Rosario Morales:          Robles, M'Hija, Robles!
    Robert Bly:               Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River
    Gary Snyder:              The Trail is not a Trail
    Olga Broumas:             Roadside
    Seamus Heaney:            The Road at Frosses
    Emily Dickinson:          'As Imper Ceptibly as Grief'
    Laury Wells:              The Nomads
    Edith Sodergran:          Nocturne
    Anon [Ewe]:               The Sky

DISQUIET: 'Something warns me everywhere'

    Ruth Fainlight:           The Power Source
    Gillian Clarke:           Neighbours
    Helen Dunmore:            Permafrost
    Anna Akhmatova:           'Distance Collapsed in Rubble'
    Seamus Heaney:            Augury
    Alden Nowlan:             St John River
    Michael Hamburger:        A Dream of Water
    Liz Lochhead:             What the Pool Said, on Midsummer's Day
    Stevie Smith:             The River God
    U. A. Fanthorpe:          Rising Damp
    Ray A. Young Bear:        The Reason Why I am Afraid Even Though I am a Fisherman
    Raymond Carver:           The River
    Andrew Young:             The Fear
    Frances Horovitz:         Winter Woods
    Frances Horovitz:         Walking in Autumn
    Stevie Smith:             Out of Time
    Emily Dickinson:          'There's A Certain Slant of Light'
    Denise Levertov:          Over Heard Over S. E. Asia
    Antoni Malczewski:        Open Spaces
    W. S. Rendra:             Twilight View
    David Jones:              From in Parenthesis
    Ruth Fainlight:           The Field
    Mahmud Darwish:           We Are Entitled to Love Autumn
    Antonio Machado:          Today's Meditation
    Hugh MacDiarmid:          One of These Days
    Lavinia Greenlaw:         The Recital of Lost Cities
    Charlotte Mew:            Domus Caedet Arborem
    James Thomson:            From the City of Dreadful Night
    Alfonsina Storni:         Men in the City
    Margaret Atwood:          A Holiday
    Issa:                     'Never Forget'
    Elaine Feinstein:         By the Cam
    George Crabbe:            from The Poor of the Borough, Letter XXII, Peter Grimes
    Thomas Hardy:             Night-Time in Mid-Fall
    John Milton:              from Paradise Lost, Book II
    James Thomson:            from the Seasons, Summer
    Kwesi Brew:               The Dry Season
    Robert Penn Warren:       Summer Storm (Circa 1916), and God's Grace
    King James Bible:         Jeremiah 4, 23-28
    Nina Cassian:             And When Summer Comes to an End ...

blurb

The poetic concern for nature has been, in the words of Anna Akhmatova, "wild
in our breast for centuries." Now, Poetry for the Earth collects an
astonishing diversity of poetic response to the environment, from eras and
places as diverse as classical Greece, Elizabethan England,
seventeenth-century Japan, contemporary Africa, and modern America. In moods
that range from urgent to contemplative, euphoric to indignant" "Even as
these poets celebrate the vivid glories of the earth, their work is streaked
with unease and fury. "Gold-empurpled autumn" and fierce leaping salmon give
way to frosted marshes awaiting the ravage of war. London's sunlit mornings
and haunting rain-slick nights contrast with the befouled rivers of Nicaragua
and the noise and filth of ancient Rome." "From haiku and tribal riddles to
blank verse, these poems speak anew to a relationship in crisis, propelling
us all toward appreciation and reflection of the planet that gives us life.
- Book jacket.