'Earth Song' was born from a pivotal moment of personal connection with nature, while the world seemed burning with pandemic fever and climate fire. This anthology of ecopoetry gathered by editor Sara Barkat is infused with vision and care. Holding the collection is like cradling a rare crystal that focuses longing, love, tenderness, hope, and a wish for the world to keep turning… in unutterable ways. Thus: the visceral need for poetry. Words that sing more than speak. Images that invite more than opine.
Arranged to mirror the experience of an orchestral piece—with repeating refrains of Teasdale and Hopkins, Earth Song unfolds its lyric moments through a wide range of voices. Historic. Modern-day. Cross-cultural. Global—with many poems in beautiful translation. The collection includes both emerging poets and greats like Neruda, Berry, Hirshfield, Darwish, Dickinson, McKay and Merwin.
Leaving off anger, which is the single emotion that many people have come to associate with environmental concern, this collection puts forth a vision more nuanced, more poignant, and not easily brushed aside. Like an irresistible piece of music, it draws readers to embrace their care for the world—starting so simply: celebrating life moment-by-small-moment.
'Earth Song' was born from a pivotal moment of personal connection with nature, while the world seemed burning with pandemic fever and climate fire. This anthology of ecopoetry gathered by editor Sara Barkat is infused with vision and care. Holding the collection is like cradling a rare crystal that focuses longing, love, tenderness, hope, and a wish for the world to keep turning… in unutterable ways. Thus: the visceral need for poetry. Words that sing more than speak. Images that invite more than opine.
Arranged to mirror the experience of an orchestral piece—with repeating refrains of Teasdale and Hopkins, Earth Song unfolds its lyric moments through a wide range of voices. Historic. Modern-day. Cross-cultural. Global—with many poems in beautiful translation. The collection includes both emerging poets and greats like Neruda, Berry, Hirshfield, Darwish, Dickinson, McKay and Merwin.
Leaving off anger, which is the single emotion that many people have come to associate with environmental concern, this collection puts forth a vision more nuanced, more poignant, and not easily brushed aside. Like an irresistible piece of music, it draws readers to embrace their care for the world—starting so simply: celebrating life moment-by-small-moment.
My experience of nature started as a child, playing for hours with my friends in the woods behind our church. We called it The Great Ravine, because there was a ravine, and it led down to a little trickle of a marsh that was mostly mud, and if you climbed up the other side, a collection of small bushes and trees all tangled with vines. It wasn’t, by any means, untouched, sitting as it was between buildings, houses, and a road—but it was undeniably wild. There’s something, perhaps a kind of heart-feeling, that recognizes the difference between what’s planned and what’s wild, and there is something more terrifying and freeing in coming to face with true wildness, even for a moment, than any number of days spent wandering parks (as lovely as that also is).
That is where I started. And, years after I pored over the “How to Make a Green Club” page in the back of a DK encyclopedia, having gone through both hopeful work toward reduce, reuse, recycle as a child, when I knew that we could fix everything if we only tried hard enough; and hopelessness, faced in college with an Environmental Justice course that with its unrelenting “it’s never enough” depressed me enough I quit the class—I find that reality only becomes more complicated, and the world more fraught.
But that’s not the whole story. The news is not and never has been, because it doesn’t talk about the small moments. Moments that matter to individuals, whatever they do or do not do in the grand scheme of things. And it is those individual moments that belong to people, that deserve to be faced and remembered as much as every big, world-changing disaster. And nature, because it exists in the details, is so easy to elide, even when trying to talk about it.
One day, in quarantine 2020, I sat on the back porch for hours as it rained, skipping between reading Gerard Manley Hopkins and just sitting and looking out onto the green of our small backyard and the bushes and flowers and trees and weeds, and listening to the rain. Not thinking, not hardly feeling, but just being. Perhaps a feeling did occur to me in that moment, but it was indescribable. Whatever it was, when I came inside, I knew I wanted to create an anthology of poems—ecopoetry, if you will, but with a twist; a difference in focus.
The structure of this book is that of a piece of music. The poems are placed to be read in order, with the entire piece going through movements. Certain pieces I’ve put back-to-back because of similarities in tone or theme, others because of subject, still others because of the effect of juxtaposition on those before and after.
In choosing what poems to put in this volume, I’ve tried to keep in mind a number of considerations. In essence, it all started with a feeling, that became, as I continued, a more formalized criterion. It started with “Lost Things,” by Sara Teasdale. Teasdale has been one of my favorite poets ever since I first read her collections; they are so simple, straightforward, and compact, but undeniably lyrical—(she herself thought of them as songs)—taking a form that could become trite and raising it to something profound through her ideas and ways of expressing herself. It’s that simplicity—and simplicity of feeling—that I’ve tried to encapsulate throughout the volume. Which isn’t to say there are no complexities; there are. There are tangles of every emotion, from joy and gladness, to nostalgia, fear, sadness, depression, and anguish.
The only emotion I purposefully stayed away from is anger. Not because that isn’t also an important moment in human experience, because it is. But on this topic, that of the environment, there has been so much already dealt with on anger, on bitterness. Sometimes, in fact, that seems all it’s possible to find—both outside and in. But simple longing is so easily subsumed under more powerfully expressed emotions, and other things just as important as anger become overshadowed. Because of that stricture, I’ve left out some poems I considered that very much struck me (for example, Robert Burns’ “The Wounded Hare” [1789]). Furthermore, I wanted to stay away from poems that were too abstract, metaphysical, theoretical; even if what they said was both interesting and pertinent; the abstract “big picture” poems tend to have a less immediate, less emotional feel, without the surprise and juxtaposition, without the experience of running into nature.
The other things I kept in mind as I chose poems were thematic. I wanted to, as far as possible, stay away from poems where the earth, or nature, were clearly—and only—being used as a metaphor, or where they were entirely idealized (as in much Romantic poetry). I also stayed away from poems that dealt with the undeniably mythical as a subject, such as mermaids. Instead I tried to stay with poems that felt immediate and real, poems where the poet is taking part in observation and action. To keep the focus on the relationship between the poet and nature, I’ve cut poems that are, on the one hand, descriptions of nature without a human element; and on the other hand, poems that are too focused on the human element, where nature is only a background. Instead I tried to balance between, at the precise intersection where the poet is an undeniable presence, and the subject of the poem is undeniably nature, or nature-and-the-poet; whether that’s broad, like a place, or narrow, like the poet and a single animal.
I also wanted this to be a collection that, as much as possible, spanned the years since this problem began. To say that people weren’t aware, from the first, of the effect the Industrial Revolution was having on nature—and on themselves—is to commit a falsehood. Both Burns (in 1791) and Gerard Manley Hopkins (in 1879) wrote, for instance, poems decrying the cutting down of trees that they had cared about; Burns going so far as to place the blame, in the poem, on exactly who was responsible, referring to the Duke of Queensberry with the lines “The worm that gnaw’d my bonie trees, / That reptile wears a ducal crown.” In fact, some of Hopkins’ depression in later life was specifically borne out of the soul-sucking effect of the polluted cities he worked in as Jesuit priest.
It would be remiss not to mention the religious elements in many of these poems as well, particularly the older ones. Hopkins, whose poems were the second addition to this volume and the other strand upon which I based my initial feeling of what it ought to be—visually and wordplay-rich, strikingly honest and personal, while also being more than personal—was of course explicitly religious. And in “Pied Beauty,” he starts his description of the natural world with “Glory be to God for dappled things.” It’s something that can do with reminding, I believe—that religion and caring for the earth, even caring about conservation, are not somehow diametrical opposites. But in no way does the addition of religious poems point to an easy answer. There may be devout poets; poets with a spiritual focus but criticisms of organized religion, such as William Blake; poets who are religious yet operate outside the Western tradition, such as Rabindranath Tagore; the many more poets where their religion becomes a subtler background to their poems; and secular poets too.
Of course, as much as it might be tempting to leave everything in the past, there are also many ways in which it is only now that people are beginning to experience the full effects of what is happening to this world, and contemporary poems are an undeniable part of the picture. For these, I wanted to find poems that specifically dealt with global warming or climate change, but where that wasn’t the entirety of the poem—where, as before, the heart lay in the interaction between the poet and nature.
Places that speak to people, places people have lost, ordinary places made memorable by an unexpected intersection with the natural world; people watching birds, cutting branches, raking leaves, walking along the river, sitting at home, remembering home, trying to find meaning, dealing with confusion, with grief. People adding humor to the humorless, adding the personal subjectivity of experience to the scientific fact, dealing with death, with guilt, with memory, with responsibility. People trying to imagine a way forward, and to come to terms with the idea that “there may not be a morning after” (L.L. Barkat, “When Morning Comes”). That multitude of experience is what this volume tries to cover, and I hope that, in some way, my selections have created a piece in which, when you read it, you might find both catharsis and challenge. Like every poet who has published something on the world, and hoped against hope it would mean something,
I hope this means something. My hopes are both ambitious and small—that this might (if only!) change the world—or that this might change merely a single moment, for someone, somewhere. It would not be enough and yet, it would be enough.
Caring for the earth is not a new phenomenon, and when brought down to its simplest level, it’s neither political nor religious. Religion is about specific beliefs. Politics is about the problems and solutions—or lack of them.
Caring itself, that’s human.
—Sara Barkat, 2020
In Earth Song: A Nature Poems Experience, Sara Barkat takes the reader through a series of beautifully serene poems about nature and its undeniable connection to the human experience. This selection of poems considers how deep and honest reflections of nature continue to have a lasting impact on how we see ourselves in the world as well as how the world fits within us.
I found myself enjoying Earth Song: A Nature Poems Experience while sitting outside on a fall afternoon. In other words, this poetry book most certainly deserves to be read in the comfort of nature.
From the 18th century to the 21st century, Barkat is mindful to include poems that resonate throughout history. These nature poems call us to live in a way that works to serve, admire, and respect our one and only planet earth. We may begin our reverence and care for earth by simply reading and sharing poems that reveal our inherent interconnectedness with nature.
At first when I learned that Barkat intentionally left out poems on anger, I felt myself unsure of how such a passionate and undeniably profound human emotion could be removed from an experience about the complexities of nature and humans. However, it's clear to me now that anger already lives in great volumes within our world as well as our souls. Therefore, there's no use in amplifying an emotion that undermines the tranquility and grace of nature.
One of my favorite poems from the collection is The Edge by Lola Ridge. While many of the other poems moved me deeply, this one in particular struck a chord within me. When I put myself in this poem, I see myself at the precipice of life—completely distraught by the human experience and determined that a fatal end would be the final kind thing I could offer myself. However, this poem grants the reader an unconditional and nonjudgemental space to sit on the edge with a special gift from nature: solitude.
In solitude we are not alone. Instead, we are comforted by the earth's beauty and in our reflections and admirations of these often overlooked aspects of our planet we find ourselves. We do this again and again—cyclical, yes (and an inevitable reality to our existence)—but if we don't constantly remind ourselves of our own beauty through nature, then what else is there to hold onto when we find ourselves falling into the darkness?
I would recommend this poetry book to anyone with an introspective desire to find themselves through the experience of nature. (Therefore, everyone.)
(Thank you Reedsy Discovery for providing me with a free ARC of Earth Song: A Nature Poems Experience. All opinions expressed are my own.)