While the state of the environment is a very current issue, passion and concern for the world around us is nearly as old as the world itself. Poetry for the Earth brings together a cross-section of some of the most beautiful and haunting poetry ever written in tribute to--or in mourning for--our magnificent landscapes.

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.

This book introduces us to female perspectives on nature. Over 90 selections, from Emily Dickinson to Alice Walker, span a century and encompass the voices of a variety of women--some known for their writing on nature, and several outstanding new voices

This landmark work explores how our attitudes toward nature are mirrored in and influenced by poetry. Showing us a resurgent vision of harmony between nature and humanity in the work of some of our most widely read poets, Imagining the Earth reveals the power of poetry to identify, interpret, and celebrate a wide range of issues related to nature and our place in it.

HERE is fierce poetic imagination that faces indifference and cynicism with a rallying call for individual activism and collective action.

Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry "The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 may be the most important book of poetry to appear in years."--Publishers Weekly "All poetry readers will want to own this book; almost everything is in it."--Publishers Weekly "If you only read one poetry book in 2012, The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton ought to be it."—NPR "The 'Collected Clifton' is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us."--The Washington Post "The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton—both the woman and her poetry—is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness."—Toni Morrison, from the Foreword The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965–2010 combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965–1969, a collection-in-progress titled the book of days (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet's career. On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition," and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America. "mother-tongue: to man-kind" (from the unpublished the book of days): all that I am asking is that you see me as something more than a common occurrence, more than a woman in her ordinary skin.

Selected by Nobel Laureate Louise Glück as Winner of the inaugural Bergman Prize, Rachel Mannheimer's debut, Earth Room, is a dazzling book-length narrative poem that explores with tenderness how art and love intersect to make one's life. Transporting the reader across decades and from the Moon to Mars by way of Alaska, Berlin, and the Hudson Valley, Earth Room considers a lineage of sculpture, performance, and land art--from Robert Smithson to Pina Bausch--with observations shaped by gender and environment, history and portents of apocalypse. With an urgent, direct, and unmistakably powerful voice, Mannheimer tests the line between nature and culture, ordinary life and performance. A work of sly wit and bracing sincerity, Earth Room is an original, unsparing book that Louise Glück calls "a lesson in how to make something of where we find ourselves."