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3 books match the query 'Ecopoetry'

cover of Ecopoetry: Critical Introduction

Ecopoetry

Critical Introduction

Scott Bryson

University of Utah Press, 2002

The burgeoning field of ecocriticism is beginning to address the work of such ecopoets as Gary Snyder, Mary Oliver, W. S. Merwin, and Wendell Berry, among others, whose poems increasingly deal with ecological and environmental issues. Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction assembles previously unpublished contributions from many of the most important scholars in the field as they discuss the historical and crosscultural roots of ecopoetry, while expanding the boundaries to include such themes as genocide and extinction, the lesbian body, and post colonialism. This volume gathers these necessary voices in the emerging conversation regarding poetry’s place in the environmental debate.

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cover of Ghost Woman: A Rising

Ghost Woman

A Rising

Crystal Simone Smith

Duke University Press, 2026

In Ghost Woman, Crystal Simone Smith explores the long and deep connections between nature, personhood, ancestry, and trauma through haiku and haibun. Separated into five sections, the poems emphasize the way social bonds and landscapes are reflected in and through the environment. Smith brings her experiences with race, motherhood, and poetry into conversation with the five elements, Wind (fu), Earth (chi), Water (sui), Fire (ka), and Void (ku) to take readers through an introspective haiku journey, an exploration of the nature of the self as well as the nature of the broader world. Balancing shattering grief with ordinary moments of love and trauma with survival, Ghost Woman weaves a narrative verse of single motherhood, bearing witness, and carrying your history with you. The poems in Ghost Woman invite readers to be with nature and themselves more intentionally.
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cover of The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space, and Ecopoetry

The West Side of Any Mountain

Place, Space, and Ecopoetry

J. Scott Bryson

University of Iowa Press, 2005

In contrast to nature poets of the past who tended more toward the bucolic and pastoral, many contemporary nature poets are taking up radical environmental and ecological themes. In the last few years, interesting and evocative work that examines this poetry has begun to lay the foundation for studies in ecopoetics.

Informed in general by current thinking in environmental theory and specifically by the work of cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, The West Side of Any Mountain participates in and furthers this scholarly attention by offering an overarching theoretical framework with which to approach the field.

One area that contemporary theorists have found problematic is the dualistic civilization/wilderness binary that focuses on the divisions between culture and nature, thereby increasing the modern sense of alienation. Tuan’s place-space framework offers a succinct vocabulary for describing the attitudes of ecological poets and other nature writers in a way that avoids setting up an adversarial relationship between place and space. Scott Bryson describes the Tuanian framework and employs it to offer fresh readings of the work of four major ecopoets: Wendell Berry, Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, and W. S. Merwin.

The West Side of Any Mountain will be of great interest to scholars and teachers working in the field of contemporary nature poetry. It is recommended for nature-writing courses as well as classes dealing with 20th-century poetry, contemporary literary criticism, and environmental theory.
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