Author(s): Cecily Parks

Poetry

"A unique anthology of poetry about the natural world that highlights the centrality of grassy places to the canon and to the human imagination. AN EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POET. The rich poetic history of grass spans the centuries, from the pastoral poems of ancient Rome to the fields and prairies of the New World. The rapturous idealizations of William Blake's "echoing green" and William Wordsworth's "splendour in the grass" stand in vivid contrast to the obliterating work of grass on human battlefields in poems such as John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" and Carl Sandburg's "Grass," or to the work of contemporary poets--Wendell Berry, Natalie Diaz, Joy Harjo, and Sherman Alexie among them--who take on our relationship with nature in an age of environmental crisis. Here is a rich array of poets from around the world, including Virgil, T'ao Ch'ien, Bashō, Andrew Marvell, Robert Burns, Victor Hugo, Christina Rossetti, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anna Akhmatova, Willa Cather, Ingeborg Bachmann, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Tomas Transtromer, and Derek Walcott, in a dazzling celebration of our complicated relationship to the natural world"--