“As we have been coediting The Ecopoetry Anthology, we’ve become ever more convinced that the environmental crisis is made possible by a profound failure of the imagination,” write editors Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street in the preface to this anthology compiling the works of writers—including Walt Whitman, H.D., Robert Hayden, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams—responding to the “burgeoning environmental crisis.” The book begins with a history of poetry about nature, creating a lineage between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry and the ecopoetics movement of the 1960s, the era in which contemporary ecopoetry bloomed. With an introduction by former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, this collection achieves a generous and capacious archive of living in the Anthropocene, offering a road towards hope through profound intelligence and emotional poetry.
