Light Over Everything: Collections of Nature Poetry

This book is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated. Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry, anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild. The editor has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. This collection features major writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson as well as newer talents such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements. It also brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole.

From the Publisher: In this beautiful collection of poems and paintings, Billy Collins, former U.S. poet laureate, joins with David Allen Sibley, America's foremost bird illustrator, to celebrate the winged creatures that have inspired so many poets to sing for centuries. From Catullus and Chaucer to Robert Browning and James Wright, poets have long treated birds as powerful metaphors for beauty, escape, transcendence, and divine expression. Here, in this substantial anthology, more than one hundred contemporary and classic poems are paired with close to sixty original, ornithologically precise illustrations. Part poetry collection, part field guide, part art book, Bright Wings presents verbal and visual interpretations of the natural world and reminds us of our intimate connection to the "bright wings" around us. Each in their own way, these poems and pictures honor the enchanting creatures that have been, and continue to be, longtime collaborators with the poet's and painter's art.

"For many years, "nature poetry" has evoked images of Romantic poets standing on mountain tops. But our poetic landscape has changed dramatically, and so has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, this book challenges what we think we know about "nature poetry," illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes--both literal and literary--are changing. You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation's most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more. Each poem engages with its author's local landscape--be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop--offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States. Joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, this singular collection of poems offers a lyrical reimagining of what "nature" and "poetry" are today, inviting readers to experience both anew."-- Provided by publisher.

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than sixty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished works feature early poems from 1965-1969, a collection-in-progress titled Book of Days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems.

"Marlanda Dekine's debut collection is a holy, radical unlearning and reclamation of self. What does it mean to be a Gullah-Geechee descendant from a rural place where a third of the nation's founding wealth was harvested by trafficked West and Central Africans? Dekine's poems travel across age and time, signaling that both the past and future exist in the present. Through erasure and persona, Dekine reimagines and calls to task the Works Progress Administration narratives, modern-day museums, and intergenerational traumas. Beyond gospel music, fear, and the stories of generations past, Thresh & Hold offers magic, healing, and innovative pathways to manifest intimacy. Dekine remembers, remakes, and brings forth their many selves, traveling far in order to deeply connect to a spiritual home within and all around them, calling: "I am listening to Spirit. I am not dying today." Marlanda Dekine is the winner of the 2021 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize"-- Provided by publisher.

This new collection by acclaimed poet Carl Dennis is about vocation in the largest sense, the work that we believe gives our lives meaning, and the challenges that come in defining such work and in doing it well. The poems approach their subject from a variety of perspectives: a calling may involve a compromise with limitations, or be an expression of individual purpose; if a calling in some poems provides an alternative to the disorder of the world, in others it offers a means to shape the world as we are shaped by it. As the poems speak to each other, they form a dialogue of attitudes that makes room for both frustration and achievement, a dialogue that includes us and takes us beyond ourselves.

"A Dangerous Heaven creates personal and political conversations that resound through both the sacred and the secular worlds. Jo Angela Edwins has spent the past many years excavating those personal relationships which shape and haunt us. She turns the same observant eye on events happening around the word. From "The Last Wild Elephant Alive" to "Death, A Rock Icon, and Sewage Pipes" Edwins is able to draw the reader into seeing events from her own unique perspective."--Amazon.com

"Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetry, like its companion prose volume, presents a selection of definitively edited texts. Accompanying each poem is a headnote prepared by Albert von Frank for the student and general reader, which serves as an entryway to the poem, offering critical and historical contexts. Detailed annotations provide further guidance. A master of the essay form, a philosopher of moods and self-reliance, and the central figure in the American romantic movement, Emerson makes many claims on our attention. Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetry reminds us exactly why his poetry also matters and why he remains one of our most important theoreticians of verse. Emerson saw his poetry and philosophy as coordinate ways of seeing the world. "It is not metres," he once declared, "but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, --a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing." All the major poems published in Emerson's lifetime--chosen from Poems (1847), May-Day and Other Pieces (1867), and Selected Poems (1876) as well as uncollected poems--are represented here. Also included in an appendix is the first selection ever made of the poems and poetic fragments that Emerson addressed to his first wife, Ellen, during their courtship and marriage and concluding with the anguish of bereavement following her death on February 8, 1831, at the age of nineteen." ; Publisher's description.

Poems vivifying nature have gripped people for centuries. From Biblical times to the present day, poetry has continuously drawn us to the natural world. In this thought-provoking book, John Felstiner explores the rich legacy of poems that take nature as their subject, and he demonstrates their force and beauty. In our own time of environmental crises, he contends, poetry has a unique capacity to restore our attention to our environment in its imperiled state. And, as we take heed, we may well become better stewards of the earth. In forty brief and lucid chapters, Felstiner presents those voices that have most strongly spoken to and for the natural world. Poets--from the Romantics through Whitman and Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop and Gary Snyder--have helped us envision such details as ocean winds eroding and rebuilding dunes in the same breath, wild deer freezing in our presence, and a person carving initials on a still-living stranded whale. Sixty color and black-and-white images, many seen for the first time, bear out visually the environmental imagination this book discovers--a poetic legacy more vital now than ever. -- From publisher's description.

"Mojave Ghost initiates an unusually tender bond with the reader as it chronicles an intimate relationship with arresting honesty and vividness. Moving through grief and loss towards a renewal that never sidesteps the wholeness of experience, Gander's new collection discovers an articulate language for the merging of exterior and interior landscapes. Gander, trained as a geologist, walked along much of the 800-mile San Andreas Fault toward the desolate town of his birth and found himself crossing permeable dimensions of time and space, correlating his emotions and the stricken landscape with other divisions: the fractures and folds underlying not only our country, but any self in its relationship with others. The result is this moving new collection that unforgettably describes a spiritual and physical journey. With its confiding tones and candid self-examination, Mojave Ghost is Gander's most inviting and poignant book yet"-- Provided by publisher.

The first collection of new materials in ten years from the previous U.S. Poet Laureate. Hass's trademark careful attention to the natural world, his subtle humor, and the delicate but wide-ranging eye he casts on the human experience are on display in this collection, touching on topics of loss, beauty, and the mutability of desire.

"Truths about what we have lost and have yet to lose permeate this book-length poem by American Book Award winner and Fulbright scholar Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. An assemblage of historical record and lyric fragments, these poems form a taxonomy of threatened lives-human, plant, and animal-in a century marked by climate emergency. Look at This Blue insists upon a reckoning with and redress of America's continuing violence toward Earth and its peoples, as Hedge Coke's cataloguing of loss crescendos into resistance"-- Provided by publisher.

"In this collection of poems, written during and immediately after two years on the road as United States Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera reports back on his travels through contemporary America. Poems written in the heat of witness, and later, in quiet moments of reflection, coalesce into an urgent, trenchant, and yet hope-filled portrait. The struggle and pain of those pushed to the edges, the shootings and assaults and injustices of our streets, the lethal border game that separates and divides, and then: a shift of register, a leap for peace and a view onto the possibility of unity. Every Day We Get More Illegal is a jolt to the conscience-filled with the multiple powers of the many voices and many textures of every day in America"-- Provided by publisher.

"A collected series of intertwined poetic essays written by acclaimed Japanese poet Hiromi Ito―part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential philosophy. Written between April 2012 and November 2013, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits adopts a non-linear narrative flow that mimics the growth of plants, and can be read as a companion piece to Ito's beloved poem "Wild Grass on the Riverbank". Rather than the vertiginously violent poetics of the latter, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits serves as what we might call a phyto-autobiography: a recounting of one's life through the logic of flora. Ito's graciously potent and philosophical prose examines immigration, language, gender, care work, and death, all through her close (indeed, at times obsessive) attention to plant life."-- Provided by Amazon.

"What does a life look like on the other side of survival, and can the one who survived come to recognize that she did? Donika Kelly's poetry is known for its resonant, unflinching confrontations with trauma and inheritance, translated through myth and nature. The Natural Order of Things expands these explorations into a new realm: one defined by joy and connection. It is an ode to companionship with people, animals, and our planet, and reveals the reparative power of intimacy. In poems inventive, playful, and formally nimble, Kelly pays homage to the voices and people she comes from, the songs of her lineage. Other poems follow the early stirrings of love to erotic transcendence with the lover and the self. Throughout, Kelly finds mirror and marvel in nature, art, and precious friendships. Though it once seemed impossible, she realizes a surprising place for herself, a rightness in the larger world. The Natural Order of Things is a brilliant and moving book, one that reaches toward equilibrium and something like happiness"-- Provided by publisher.

In her second poetry collection, Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with "how to" poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to unreliable gods; doing nothing at all; and of course, flying. Next come rafts of poems about making peace (or not) with the complicated bonds of friendship and family, and making peace (or not) with death, in the many ways it finds us. Some poems reflect on the redemptive powers of art and poetry itself; others consider where everything begins. Closing the book are poems that celebrate natural wonders--birdsong and ghost-flowers, ruthless ants, clever shellfish, coral reefs, deadly deserts, and thousand-year-old beech trees--all speaking to the daring project of belonging to an untamed world beyond ourselves.

"From J. Drew Lanham, MacArthur "Genius" Grant recipient and author of Sparrow Envy: A Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, comes a sensuous new collection in his signature mix of poetry and prose. In gorgeous and timely pieces, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves is a lush journey into wildness and Black being. Lanham notices nature through seasonal shifts, societal unrest, and deeply personal reflection and traces a path from bitter history to the present predicament. Drawing canny connections between the precarity of nature and the long arm of racism, the collection offers reconciliation and eco-reparation as hopeful destinations from our current climate of division. In Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves, Lanham mines the deep connection to ancestors through the living world and tunes his unique voice toward embracing the radical act of joy"-- Provided by publisher.

"Pulitzer Prize finalist Dorianne Laux returns with an insightful, compassionate, and spirited volume that celebrates the imperfect miracle of humanity. In her seventh collection, Dorianne Laux once again offers poems that move us, include us, and appreciate us fully as the flawed humans we are. Life on Earth is a book of praise for our planet and ourselves, delivered with Laux's trademark vitality, frank observation, and earthy wisdom."--Amazon.com.

"Award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin was lauded by millions for her groundbreaking science fiction and fantasy novels, though she began her career as a poet. "I still kind of twitch and growl when I'm reduced to being the science fiction writer. I'm a novelist and increasingly a poet. And sometimes I wish they'd call me that," Le Guin said in a 2015 interview with NPR. In this clarifying and sublime collection--written shortly before her death in 2018--Le Guin immerses herself in the natural world, ruminating on the mysteries of dying, and considering the simple, redemptive lessons of the earth"-- Provided by publisher.

"An astonishing collection about interconnectedness-between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves-from National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ada Limón"-- Provided by publisher.

"Praise for Jamaal May: "Linguistically acrobatic [and] beautifully crafted. [Jamaal May's] poems, exquisitely balanced by a sharp intelligence mixed with earnestness, makes his debut a marvel."--Publishers Weekly -- Following May's award-winning debut collection, Hum (2013), these new poems explore parallel landscapes of the poet's interior and an insidious American condition. Using dark humor that helps illuminate the pains of maturity and loss of imagination, May uncovers language like a skilled architect-digging up bones of the past to expose what lies beneath the surface of the fragile human condition. From: "Ask Where I've Been":Ask about the tornado of fists. The blows landed. If you can watch it all-the spit and blood frozen against snow, you can probably tell I am the too-narrow road winding out of a crooked city built of laughter, abandon, feathers and drums. Ask only if you can watch streetlights bow, bridges arc, and power lines sag, and still believe what matters most is not where I bend but where I am growing. Jamaal May is a poet, editor, and filmmaker from Detroit, Michigan, where he taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer and touring performer. His poetry won the 2013 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and appears in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, the Believer, NER, and the Kenyon Review. May has earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and The Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. He founded the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press."-- Provided by publisher.

One of America's best-loved poets, Edna St Vincent Millay (1892-1950) burst onto the literary scene at a very young age and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923. Her lyrics and sonnets have thrilled generations of readers long after the notoriously bohemian lifestyle she led in Greenwich Village in the 1920s ceased to shock them.

"Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as "far and away, this country's best selling poet" by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years. Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver's work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015"-- Provided by publisher.

"A collection of poems by Gregory Orr"-- Provided by publisher.

A Sleepwalk on the Severn is a reflective, book-length poem in several registers, using dramatic dialogue. Ghostly, meditative, and characterized by Alice Oswald's signature sensitivity to nature, the poem chronicles a night on the Severn Estuary as the moonrise travels through its five stages: new moon, half moon, full moon, no moon, and moon reborn.

Join Glenis Redmond, Greenville's first Poet Laureate, on a poetic journey through South Carolina's State Parks with "The Song of Everything". Being diagnosed with cancer and amid COVID, she visits South Carolina's State Parks with her grandson, Julian, as a life-affirming act for both of them. This pocket-sized collection of poems explores the enduring connection between the natural world and our internal landscape. Her poetry invites everyone to rediscover the wonders of the world around us, the stories they have to tell, and the lessons they have to teach us.--from publisher

"Call this mutiny is the seventh book from award-winning and internationally-renowned Pacific Islander author Craig Santos Perez. These poems were originally published in journals and anthologies between 2008-2023, but this is the first time they have been collected into a single volume. Throughout, Perez continues his critical exploration of native cultures, decolonial politics, colonial histories, and the entangled ecologies of his homeland of Guam, his current residence of Hawaiʻi, and the larger Pacific region in relation to the Global South and the Indigenous Fourth World. As he reminds us about the power of storytelling: 'If we can write the ocean, we will never be silenced.'"-- Provided by publisher.

A collection of poems from one of America's foremost African-American poets, threads the journey from youthful innocence to the whittled-hard awareness of adulthood.

"Gary Snyder is one of America's indispensable poets, the "Thoreau of the Beat Generation" and our "laureate of Deep Ecology." Now, for the first time, all of Snyder's poetry is gathered in a single, authoritative Library of America volume. Here are all of Snyder's published books of poetry spanning a career of almost seventy years. Early collections such as Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, Myths & Texts, and The Back Country reflect his hardscrabble rural upbringing in the Pacific Northwest; his life as a logger, fire-lookout, freighter crewman, carpenter, and trail-blazer; his lifelong interest in Native American oral literatures; and his pioneering studies of Zen Buddhism. In Turtle Island and Axe Handles--the former a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and the latter the American Book Award in 1984--he explores countercultural alternatives to environmental and spiritual decline and envisioning new forms of harmony with nature. His epic Mountains and Rivers Without End, a poem four decades in the making and regarded by many as his masterwork, is followed by Danger on Peaks, and the intimate, preternaturally candid late lyrics of This Present Moment, which meditate on his life as a father, husband, friend, neighbor, and homesteader in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada, where he has lived since 1971. The volume concludes with a generous selection, made by Snyder himself, of previously uncollected poems from little magazines and broadsides; translations from East Asian literatures; and drafts and fragments never before published. Also included are explanatory notes, a detailed chronology of Snyder's life, and an essay on textual selection"-- Provided by publisher.

"[This volume] is written for this era of global struggle. It finds its ferment at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe. Its feminist and celebratory energy is fueled by street protests and their shattered windows. Amid oil spills and austerity measures and shore birds and a child holding its mother's hand and hissing teargas canisters, it reminds us exactly what we must fight to defend with a wild ferocity, and what were up against"--Amazon.com.

"Swimming in Gilead by Cassie Premo Steele takes us through the journey of a woman who, empowered to express herself through the feminist spirit of a writing group, explores what it means to be a woman and an ally in an era of uncertainty. In the summer of 2020 as the pandemic was raging, Cassie joined a group of six women-three from Canada and three from the United States, four white and two women of color, and five lesbians and one straight-to sit and write remotely once a week. They called themselves the Sisters of Gilead, strangers who came together during the loneliness and terror of the pandemic and in the process, helped each other survive. And they helped each other write. Cassie is a lesbian ecofeminist poet and novelist who lives in South Carolina with her wife. Her collection of poetry is her call to action, an invitation to each of us to examine what is within, and how, with the support of feminist advocates as friends, we can make something beautiful out of our "torn parts." The poems within Swimming in Gilead were written under the loving kindness and acceptance of the Sisters of Gilead. By opening into vulnerability, the poems show readers how to "swim in Gilead" with hope and perseverance even as our rights as women are being ripped away"-- Provided by publisher.