Here are 13 books that Earth Shattering fans have personally recommended if you like
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Ever since my childhood on a farm poetry has helped me pay attention to the world around me. Like a naturalist’s field guide, nature poems name, depict, and explore what might otherwise pass unnoticed. Now in the midst of environmental crisis I believe poets have a role alongside ecologists, farmers, and foresters to protect and restore our threatened habitats and species. Writing nature poetry helps me face and express loss while celebrating what still survives. I value poetry that connects us to what we love and gives us courage to imagine different ways of living.
I have a love of fields having grown up on a farm in the west of Ireland and now living on a hillside in Co. Wicklow.
The boundaried space of a field is like a poem in how it restricts and frees, hides and reveals, protects and exposes the life within. This anthology, first published in 1998, is testimony to what fields have meant and still mean to us. Every page reveals a moving poem by one of my favourite poets; Gillian Clarke, John Clare, Thomas Hardy, Denise Levertov, Seamus Heaney, Patrick Kavanagh, Alice Oswald.
The anthology is produced by Common Ground, a Devon-based charity that seeks to reconnect people with nature and inspire communities to become responsible for their local environment.
Meadows and fields exist at the boundary where human endeavors meet the natural world. The poems in this collection are drawn from across centuries of a literary tradition that uses the pastoral landscape as setting for exploring complex and timeless questions about that encounter between human and non-human existence. The poems were chosen as lyrical celebrations-or in some instances, eulogies-for fields, and for the old way of life that fields represent. Some of the poets evoke lullabies out of childhood memory; others beat archetypal time to the rhythm of work: plowing and sowing, haying and threshing. More recent poems document…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Ever since my childhood on a farm poetry has helped me pay attention to the world around me. Like a naturalist’s field guide, nature poems name, depict, and explore what might otherwise pass unnoticed. Now in the midst of environmental crisis I believe poets have a role alongside ecologists, farmers, and foresters to protect and restore our threatened habitats and species. Writing nature poetry helps me face and express loss while celebrating what still survives. I value poetry that connects us to what we love and gives us courage to imagine different ways of living.
By showcasing the rich tradition of queer poets whose writing is inspired by nature, Queer Nature opens up the nature poetry genre.
It is the book I needed twenty years ago when I began writing poetry. In my search for queer role models I was happy to find Mary Oliver, Kay Ryan, and Elizabeth Bishop but little did I know how many others were hiding in plain sight. This expansive anthology presents up to 200 more poets from 150 years ago to the present day, with a moving introduction by editor Michael Walsh.
Funny, sad, complex, and direct; the poems explore exclusion and alienation as well as love and belonging. Above all else this anthology confirms that poetry is as boundless as nature and that together they belong to everyone.
An anthology of queer nature poetry spanning three centuries.
This anthology amplifies and centers LGBTQIA+ voices and perspectives in a collection of contemporary nature poetry. Showcasing over two hundred queer writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Queer Nature offers a new context for and expands upon the canon of nature poetry while also offering new lenses through which to view queerness and the natural world.
In the introduction, editor Michael Walsh writes that the anthology is "concerned with poems that speak to and about nature as the term is applied in everyday language to queer and trans bodies…
Ever since my childhood on a farm poetry has helped me pay attention to the world around me. Like a naturalist’s field guide, nature poems name, depict, and explore what might otherwise pass unnoticed. Now in the midst of environmental crisis I believe poets have a role alongside ecologists, farmers, and foresters to protect and restore our threatened habitats and species. Writing nature poetry helps me face and express loss while celebrating what still survives. I value poetry that connects us to what we love and gives us courage to imagine different ways of living.
This is an exciting and important poetry anthology.
Spanning the history of black poetry in America, the editor Camille T. Dungy has collected one hundred and eighty poems by ninety-three poets. Her introduction radically enlarges the realm of eco-poetry as she considers the exclusion of African-American poets from the nature poetry genre while also exploring the complexity of their relationship with the land that witnessed or abetted centuries of racist subjugation.
Thought-provoking essays by Alice Walker, Marilyn Nelson, and others, introduce each of the ten sections in which I found a treasure trove of poets I’ve long admired, such as Rita Dove and Ross Gay, and poets I’ve never come across before, such as Kamilah Aisha Moon.
This book presents the natural world seen through the eyes of black poets. ""Black Nature"" 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…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Ever since my childhood on a farm poetry has helped me pay attention to the world around me. Like a naturalist’s field guide, nature poems name, depict, and explore what might otherwise pass unnoticed. Now in the midst of environmental crisis I believe poets have a role alongside ecologists, farmers, and foresters to protect and restore our threatened habitats and species. Writing nature poetry helps me face and express loss while celebrating what still survives. I value poetry that connects us to what we love and gives us courage to imagine different ways of living.
What’s distinctive about this gorgeous poetry anthology is not only that each poem has a specific tree or flower as its subject but that they are grouped according to plant family.
The editor Sarah Maguire was a gardener as well as a poet and translator. In what was clearly a labour of love she brought together poems from all over the world, spanning eight centuries of writing. Her fascinating introduction considers many aspects of nature poetry, including gender and colonialism.
As a gardener and poet I have loved finding poems by Medbh McGuckian, Emily Dickinson and D.H. Lawrence grouped together in the Gentian family or poems by Louise Glück, Seamus Heaney, Lorna Goodison, Robert Herrick, Marianne Moore, and Richard Wilbur thriving next to each other in the Mint family.
This new anthology is as entrancing as the lost gardens of Heligan - I cannot imagine an anthology anyone would enjoy more.' Ruth Padel, The IndependentThis beautifully compiled and designed anthology brings together over 250 poems about flowers, plants and trees from eight centuries of writing in English. Fourteenth-century lyrics sit next to poems of the twenty-first century; celebrations of plants native to the English soil share the volume with more exotic plant poetry from further afield, creating a cornucopia of intriguing juxtapositions. There are thirty poems about roses, by poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Dorothy Parker and the South…
I have published 18 books of poetry, most recently the one I have listed here, as well as a collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation. My emphasis has always been on the more progressive and risk-taking kinds of expression, as seen with the Beat poets, Ginsberg and Corso, and the New York School poets, Ashbery and O'Hara. Seeing a lack of that perspective on bookshelves, I edited two editions of a major anthology, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, and 42 issues of the literary magazine, New American Writing. I have been reading, more recently, a lot of great writing by women, especially those writing at length, with the volume up.
Known for her long and often book-length poems, Maria Baranda is a leading poet of Mexico. This book contains two works, "From the Natural History of the Rustic"and "From the Natural History of Atlantica."
The project was inspired by an artist friend who would collect objects in the forest for his artworks, but first, he would talk at length about them. Written with a light hand, the poem is a gentle spoof of the friend who also shares in his wonderment: “I think of white lilies at the height of lightning. My friend has taught me.”
ATLANTICA AND THE RUSTIC is a luminous collection of verses documenting the earth in all its radiant, ravaged particularity. Like the shifting boundary between sea and sky, a tenuous horizon joins the two halves of this brilliantly translated book: the first a series of ecological encounters reported to the poet by a friend; the second a fragmented lyric from the very edge of the terrestrial world. Throughout, María Baranda's bristling, peripatetic lines remind us that "any route is an artifice," any memory stained with the "vestiges of oblivion." This translation marks an invaluable contribution to the field of Anglophone ecopoetics…
Long before I fell in love with History as an academic subject, I fell in love with stories. And as the granddaughter of Caribbean immigrants, true stories of my grandparents’ early lives could transport me to another place as vividly as fiction. So although I have studied History to Master’s level, where I specialized in the legacy of slavery, it is always to fiction that I turn to breathe life into the past. My favourite books are those that are unsettling in the unfamiliarity of the world they create, and yet deeply moving because, at heart, the characters are motivated by timeless and human things like grief, ambition, or love.
This is not a book about history so much as one that has history suffused through it.
To me, it so perfectly captures what I love most about the Caribbean – the way that the past is always close to the surface. Derek Walcott writes so movingly about St Lucia, which is where my grandmother was born.
This is a book that is made for re-reading – I have read it at least three times now, and every time I spot a new line or a new image to savour.
Omeros is the grand epic poem told in multiple chapters from Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott.
With circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, Omeros simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events--the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement--and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.
“One of the great poems of our time.” —John Lucas, New Statesman
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I have accompanied dying people for more than twenty-five years—as a counsellor, volunteer chaplain, and companion. I feel passionate about changing the perception of dying and death, the way we care for people during their most vulnerable moments, and how we support families through this painful time. Since my twenties I have been immersed in Buddhist practise which inspires and informs my life and work. Together with other clinicians and mindfulness practitioners, we created one of the first contemplative-based training in end-of-life care for caregivers called “Authentic Presence”. Daring to be present might be the hardest thing you may have done in your life, and, you may come to discover, one of the most intimate, beautiful, and rewarding.
If you are looking for a ‘quick fix' or 'how to’ read, this book may at first glance not be the most obvious choice. Awake at the Bedside is not your traditional guidebook. It is a moving and insightful collection of essays written by clinicians, chaplains, caregivers, pioneers in end-of-life care, contemplative teachers, and poets. Each essay sheds light on the different facets of what it means to show up at the bedside and the opportunity to wake up to each moment. I contributed a chapter on spiritual care, but that’s not why I recommend this volume. I recommend it because it is written by caregivers for caregivers—honest, reflective, compassionate, inspirational, and practical. A human and compassionate vision for end-of-life care.
This book isn’t about dying. It’s about life and what life has to teach us. It’s about caring and what giving care really means.
In Awake at the Bedside, pioneers of palliative and end-of-life care as well as doctors, chaplains, caregivers and even poets offer wisdom that will challenge, uplift, comfort—and change the way we think about death.
Equal parts instruction manual and spiritual testimony, it includes specific instructions and personal accounts to inspire, counsel, and teach. An indispensable resource for anyone involved in hospice work or caregiving of any kind.
Contributors include Anyen Rinpoche, Coleman Barks, Craig D. Blinderman,…
When I was a young adult, I lost someone whom I’d loved intensely. In the aftermath, I experienced a grief that would not subside for more than a year and interfered with my ability to function. This is known as complicated grief. As a result, I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject, looking for books that present complicated grief in a humane and understandable manner. While there is a place for self-help books, I’ve found creative literature to be more helpful, especially books written in the first person that offers a metaphorical hand to the reader. I published a detailed essay in Shenandoah on this topic.
This may seem an unconventional pick because it’s a book of poetry. But it’s narrative poetry, and it affects me deeply every time I read it. Mosab Abu Toha is from Gaza, a place saturated in grief, an unending kind of grief where no one ever has the luxury of healing because death follows death follows death, and displacement follows displacement.
The book was published before the most devastating attacks of 2023-2024, and reflects on deaths and destruction from prior bombing campaigns. It repeatedly asks, in the most detailed and profound ways, how to grieve one’s home and homeland, how to process one death after another, and how to remember and hold onto details about people and places when almost every physical remnant is destroyed or displaced.
It also contemplates how to grieve while directly facing one’s own mortality and vulnerability. The first poem, Palestine A-Z, is a 10-page catalog…
Winner of the American Book Award, the Palestine Book Award and Arrowsmith Press's 2023 Derek Walcott Poetry Prize
National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry Finalist
"Written from his native Gaza, Abu Toha's accomplished debut contrasts scenes of political violence with natural beauty."-The New York Times
In this poetry debut Mosab Abu Toha writes about his life under siege in Gaza, first as a child, and then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, and yet, his poetry is inspired by a profound humanity.
Ever since I can remember, during difficult periods, or just when I needed inspiration, I have turned to poetry. Eventually, I became so in love with poetry that I became a poet. I believe these five books of poetry will offer even a reader who is generally not drawn to poetry solace and strength and inspiration. I would go so far as to say each of these poetry collections has changed me for the better.
I first heard some of the poems from this book at a reading given by Joy Harjo. The deep and varied rhythms combined with the spiritual world she finds in the everyday captivated me.
I felt an almost desperate need to read the whole book. I bought it, immersed myself in it, and have come back to its wisdom time and time again. You will feel these poems deep in your bones.
First published in 1983 and now considered a classic, She Had Some Horses is a powerful exploration of womanhood's most intimate moments. Joy Harjo's poems speak of women's despair, of their imprisonment and ruin at the hands of men and society, but also of their awakenings, power, and love.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
As an author, editor, and woman of color, I celebrate stories that reflect a diversity of voices. Good storytelling allows us to catch a glimpse into lives that may be similar or different from ours, that champion what makes us unique while reminding us that we are not alone.
Edited by former Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, this poetry
collection does not exclusively feature women, but we all need more poetry in
our lives. This expansive collection of native voices spans from 17th
century to the 20th, and is the most historically comprehensive collection
of native poetry to date. When the Light of the World Was Subdued should
be recommended reading everywhere.
United States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 indigenous nations, into one momentous volume. This landmark anthology celebrates the indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries.
Opening with a blessing from Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday, the book contains powerful introductions from contributing editors who represent the five geographically organised sections. Each section begins with a poem from the massive libraries of oral literatures and closes with emerging poets, ranging from Eleazar, a seventeenth-century Native student at Harvard, to Jake…
