As the critic R. P. Blackmur said, poetry “adds to the stock of available reality.” In The Ecopoetry Anthology, editors Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street present hundreds of poems that add to our reality about the natural world, its beauties and its degradations. This groundbreaking collection has the capacity to transform people’s lives aesthetically and politically. Poetry’s eloquent and ineffable power can work to enhance our understanding of the world beyond the human and lead us to act with more respect, humility, and stewardship toward the environment.

The poets collected here, of wide-ranging talents, backgrounds, and beliefs, speak in many voices to reinforce the most critical story of our time: that we must love and care for the planet and appreciate the integrated biological beauty that sustains us, or lose the only world we’ve got.

Shelf Awareness, Feb 11, 2013

Review: The Ecopoetry Anthology
The Ecopoetry Anthology by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, editors (Trinity University Press, $24.95 paperback, 9781595341464, February 12, 2013)

What drew us to the magnet of your dying?…
Voyager, chief of the pelagic world,…
Master of the whale-roads,
let the white wings of the gulls
spread out their cover.|
You have become like us,
disgraced and mortal.
These powerful lines are from Stanley Kunitz’s “The Wellfleet Whale,” one of the many poems in Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street’s rich and generous The Ecopoetry Anthology. Nature poetry has been around as long as poetry, Fisher-Wirth and Gray tell us, but, sometime around 1960, more people began to pay attention to an environment and nature in crisis–and poetry began to reflect this renewed attention.
“Poetry does not tamper with the world,” as William Carlos Williams wrote, “but moves it.” So here is an abundance of poems–praising songs, incantations, lists, elegies, rhapsodies, jeremiads–each in their very different ways bearing the power “to break through our dulled disregard, our carelessness, our despair, reawakening our sense of the vitality and beauty of nature.” All told, 320 poems by 208 poets–abundance indeed.
Part one presents poets, from Walt Whitman to Denise Levertov, who predate the environmental revolution. Next come 176 contemporaries, from A.R. Ammons to Robert Wrigley. It’s apropos that the first poem in this middle section is Ammons’s seminal piece, “Corson’s Inlet,” where he observes nature as he walks along his Jersey Shore dunes: “in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of/ primrose/ more or less dispersed.”
Fisher-Wirth and Gray have done a superb job of providing works by both well-known and lesser known poets. Alongside such luminaries as W.S. Merwin, Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver, one can discover beautiful and moving pieces by Patrick Lawler, Davis McCombs or Annie Boutelle. Some readers may be disappointed at the absence of a favorite poem, but most of the “great” nature pieces of the modern era are here, including Galway Kinnell’s overwhelming “The Bear,” Robert Bly’s moving prose poem “The Dead Seal” and Robert Hass’s mini-epic, “State of the Planet.” Hass also provides a wise introduction, noting that The Ecopoetry Anthology reveals the ways our “nature poetry developed toward an ecopoetics, toward the necessity of imagining a livable earth.” –Tom Lavoie
Shelf Talker: Here is bounty indeed–an innovative anthology drawing upon 150 years of American poetry about nature, animals and our precious environment.

To learn more about Greg, please read this interview conducted by Ole Miss MFA Paul Dean: http://www.countrydogreview.org/Greg_Brownderville.html

Education

• Ph.D, English, Ohio University (1976)
• M.A., English, Southern Illinois University (1969)
• B.A., English, University of Virginia (1965)

Teaching and Research Interests

• 19^th and 20^th Century American and British Poetry
• Poetry Writing
• Contemporary Literary Criticism and Non-Fiction

Selected Publications

• Hawks on Wires: Poems Poems 2005-2010 (poems). Louisiana State University Press, 2011.
• Afield: Writers on Bird Dogs (essays, ed. with Robert DeMott). Skyhorse, 2010.
• Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry (essays). Louisiana State University Press, 2006.
• Little Boats, Unsalvaged (poems). Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
• The Wick of Memory: new and Selected Poems 1970-2000 (poems). Louisiana State University Press, 2000.
• Floating on Solitude: Three Books of Poems (poems). University of Illinois Press, 1997.
• Fate’s Kite: Poems 1991-1995 (poems). Louisiana State University Press, 1995.
• Cuba Night (poems). William Morrow & Co., 1990.
• Local Assays: On Contemporary American Poetry (essays). University of Illinois Press, 1985.
• The Roundhouse Voices: Selected and New Poems (poems). Harper & Row, 1985.
• In the House of the Judge (poems). Harper & Row, 1983.
• Homage to Edgar Allan Poe (poems). Louisiana State University Press, 1981.
• Dream Flights (poems). University of Illinois Press, 1981.
• Goshawk, Antelope (poems). University of Illinois Press, 1981.
• Onliness (novel). Louisiana State University Press, 1981.
• Cumberland Station (poems). University of Illinois Press, 1979.

photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Chiyuma Elliott is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University (2011-13) and a Visiting Scholar in English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her poems have appeared in the African American Review, Callaloo, The Collagist, the Langston Hughes Review, MARGIE, the Notre Dame Review, and Torch, and her poem cycle on Satchel Paige has been performed by the Word for Word Performing Arts Company. She has received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, Cave Canem, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2012, she won the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the University of Texas at Austin for Blackness and Rural Modernity in the 1920s. Chiyuma is currently at work on two poetry chapbooks: a collection on Faulkner and African American poetry (co-edited with Derrick Harriell), and a collaboration with photographer Sara Gamble titled Here It Is.

Education

Ph.D. in American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin (2011)

M.F.A. in Creative Writing, Warren Wilson College (2010)

B.A. in English, Stanford University (1996)

Teaching and Research Interests

• African American Literature
• The Harlem Renaissance/New Negro Movement
• 20^th Century American Literature
• Poetry and Poetics
• Modernism
• American Intellectual History

Selected Publications

“African American Literature” (forthcoming). The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Vol. 23: Race. Thomas C. Holt and Laurie Green, eds. (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2013).

“Still Life With Hands, Wishes and Plate,” and “Things I Know Like the Back of My Hands” (forthcoming). White Space Poetry Anthology (2013).

“Lilies.”  Another and Another: An Anthology from The Grind Daily Writing Series, Matthew Olzmann and Ross White, eds. (Durham, NC: Bull City P, 2012).

“California Winter League.” Cave Canem Anthology XII. (Detroit: Willow Books, 2012).