Third edition, with new foreword by Craig Santos Perez, forthcoming in January 2020.
(Trinity University Press, 2013)
Ann Fisher-Wirth (editor), Laura-Gray Street (editor), Robert Hass (introduction)
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.
Some key features:
- The Ecopoetry Anthology is the most comprehensive collection yet of American poetry about nature and the environment, stressing our relationship to the other-than-human world
- Includes an introduction by the former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass
- Begins with a historical section (mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century) of more than 80 poems by 30 poets—from Walt Whitman to Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, and Denise Levertov
- Contains an alphabetically arranged contemporary section includes work written from 1960 onward providing voices relevant to our natural world and its challenges
- Contains 320 poems by 176 poets as diverse as John Ashbery, Wendell Berry, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Lucille Clifton, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirshfield, Tony Hoagland, W. S. Merwin, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mary Oliver, Donald Revell, Ed Roberson, Benjamin Alire Saenz, Gary Snyder, and C. D. Wright
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.
“Ravishing, devastating, and uplifting, this is a mighty, conscionable, and defining anthology of vital poetry shaped by profound environmental intelligence.”— Booklist
“It’s a must-read for everyone concerned with our disappearing environment.”— San Antonio Express-News
“A definitive new collection of poems about nature and environment.” Read full review » — Orion
“The Ecopoetry Anthology is a beautifully constructed, carefully planned, and intelligently framed volume.”
Read full review » — Colorado Review
“Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street’s rich and generous The Ecopoetry Anthology…Here is bounty indeed–an innovative anthology drawing upon 150 years of American poetry about nature, animals and our precious environment.”— Shelf Awareness
The editors write, “the environmental crisis is made possible by a profound failure of the imagination.” Poetry returns us to full attention. The highest use, then, of this anthology might be the material it provides for the imagination.”
Read full review » — ForeWord Reviews
ann fisher-wirth 
I’m buying this right away!