- Hardcover: 432 pages
- Publisher: Yale University Press (9 Jun 2009)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0300137508
- ISBN-13: 978-0300137507
- Product Dimensions: 24.2 x 16.6 x 3.4 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,089,678 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems
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Review
"a remarkable book ... perfectly timed ... to the ongoing and increasingly worrying saga of the gradual meltdown of our planet." --Richard Edmonds, Birmingham Post, 17th July 2009
"Felstiner manages to be both ecstatic and admonitory, visionary and attentive to detail... (a) learned enthusiastic and hopeful achievement."
--Rachel Hadas, Times Literary Supplement, 24th April 2009
`Felstiner has much of interest to say ... a thoughtful study.'
--Mick Herron, Geographical, 1st October 2009
"Felstiner manages to be both ecstatic and admonitory, visionary and attentive to detail... (a) learned enthusiastic and hopeful achievement."
--Rachel Hadas, Times Literary Supplement, 24th April 2009
`Felstiner has much of interest to say ... a thoughtful study.'
--Mick Herron, Geographical, 1st October 2009
Product Description
Poems vivifying nature have gripped people for centuries. From ancient Biblical times through 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 colour 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.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Thank you, John Felstiner
1 May 2009
Format:Hardcover
I just picked up my copy of Felstiner's new book. I have long been an adminrer of his biography and translations of Paul Celan, and it seems like that deep knowledge of poetry and sympathetic response to suffering in all its forms has led him on this great journey into centuries of nature poetry. Very heavy on quotations, and likely to send readers back into the library and elsewhere on Amazon to find a million other books--and out walking and seeing better in our own watersheds--which is a great thing for a literary critic to do. A wonderful contribution to the field!
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Iconic book for lyrical nature poetry
15 July 2009
Format:Hardcover
Few literati write with such authority and gentle sensitivity on lyrical poetry. Gifted writer and commentator, John Felstiner also has a seer's keen edge in identifying meaningful words in the poet's lexicon on nature; his voice imparts a needed edge of prophetic augury in the possibly saving medium of poetry for the earth. This book also slyly reminds us how much we love to take along favorite ramblers' guides through ferny places with this apt title: Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems. For several centuries, British Lake Poets and Transcendentalists offered early gleams of Romantic awe for nature, but Felstiner ably demonstrates this continuing tradition in a secular present, knowing its responsibility.
In his careful readings of Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Pablo Neruda, Denise Levertov, W. S. Merwin, and many others, Felstiner hones his voice on the alchemy of image in the almost animistic appreciation of poets for the beauty of the earth. Whether in garden or wilderness, by glacier or waterfall, rocky desert or mountain shadow, lake or fen, Felstiner's distilled biographies of poets' deepest inspired communions with landscape and topography - as, for example, with Neruda at Machu Picchu and Kaufman in Jerusalem - show his depth of understanding the most subtle word choice in heeding poetic muses. This book will be iconic for all who love lyrical wisdom and the profundity underlying its imagery.
In his careful readings of Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Pablo Neruda, Denise Levertov, W. S. Merwin, and many others, Felstiner hones his voice on the alchemy of image in the almost animistic appreciation of poets for the beauty of the earth. Whether in garden or wilderness, by glacier or waterfall, rocky desert or mountain shadow, lake or fen, Felstiner's distilled biographies of poets' deepest inspired communions with landscape and topography - as, for example, with Neruda at Machu Picchu and Kaufman in Jerusalem - show his depth of understanding the most subtle word choice in heeding poetic muses. This book will be iconic for all who love lyrical wisdom and the profundity underlying its imagery.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
"nature is never spent"-G.M.Hopkins; Review by Dr. Don Foran
14 Jan 2010
Format:Hardcover
For a number of years I've taught a course at The Evergreen State College titled "How Poetry Saves the World." Felstiner's 2009 book, "Can Poetry Save the Earth?" certainly caught my attention. And he delivers the goods. Packed with excellent poems and astute observations, this book is superbly crafted. Fine photographs and illustrations enhance the exploration. Poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Stanley Kunitz, Marianne Moore, D.H.Lawrence, Wallace Stevens (somewhat surprisingly), and Robinson Jeffers are cited, discussed,illuminated. Seamus Heaney and Mary Oliver are given short shrift, but even Homer nods. The reader feels, by the book's conclusion, that he has been blackberry picking with Galway Kinnell, slurping maple syrup with Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon at Eagle Pond Farm, and apple-picking with Robert Frost in a New England orchard. The immediacy of nature, the loveliness of earth, "the sense and spirit that poetry can awaken" (Felstiner's words) give us hope that humankind can recover "the dearest freshness deep down things" which Hopkins, in 1878, prophetically called us to attend to.
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