Earth Shattering lines up a chorus of over two hundred poems addressing environmental destruction and ecological balance.
Whether the subject is the whole earth (global warming, climate change, extinction of species, planetary catastrophe), or landscapes, homelands and cities (polluting rivers and seas, fouling the air, felling trees and forests), there are poems here to alert and alarm anyone willing to read or listen.
Other poems illuminate the ecological balance of the rapidly vanishing natural world. The book presents an ecopicture of the earth in all its diversity exposing the many ways in which the very fabric of our living planet is being torn apart.
Earth Shattering’s words of warning include contributions from many great writers of the past as well as leading contemporary poets from around the world, ranging from Wordsworth, Keats, Clare, Hopkins, Hardy and Rilke to A.R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, John Burnside, Helen Dunmore, Joy Harjo, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, Denise Levertov, W.S. Merwin, Mary Oliver, Peter Reading and Gary Snyder.
This was the first anthology to show the full range of ecopoetry, from the wilderness poetry of ancient China to 21st-century native American poetry, with postcolonial and feminist perspectives represented by writers such as Derek Walcott, Ernesto Cardenal, Oodgeroo and Susan Griffin.
Ecopoetry goes beyond traditional nature poetry to take on distinctly contemporary issues, recognising the interdependence of all life on earth, the wildness and otherness of nature, and the irresponsibility of our attempts to tame and plunder nature. The poems dramatise the dangers and poverty of a modern world perilously cut off from nature and ruled by technology, self-interest and economic power.
As the world’s politicians and corporations orchestrate our headlong rush towards Eco-Armageddon, poetry may seem like a hopeless gesture. But its power is in the detail, in the force of each individual poem, in every poem’s effect on every reader. And anyone whose resolve is stirred will strengthen the collective call for change.
'Any poetry anthology, in any field, inevitably owes something to those anthologies that have gone before it. But with Earth Shattering, Neil Astley has set out to do something rather different – not just moving us well beyond the canon of "nature poetry" (which a number of other anthologies have also sought to do over the last few years), but by digging much deeper into the complexities of the historical relationship between humankind and the living Earth that sustains us, reflected in a highly contemporaneous and politically aware way. That will certainly appeal to environmental activists who will already be familiar with many of the poets featured in Earth Shattering. But they will discover a whole lot more than this in this astonishingly eclectic and wide-ranging anthology.' – Jonathon Porritt, Sofia
David Constantine: two poems on environmental destruction
David Constantine reads two prophetic poems on environmental destruction included in Earth Shattering, ‘Dominion’ from his Collected Poems and ‘Pity’ from Nine Fathom Deep.
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