Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems [Hardcover]

Mr. John Felstiner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 7, 2009

Poems vivifying nature have gripped people for centuries. From Biblical times to 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 color 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. (20090817)

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A really smart account of how American poets have understood the natural world. This book will be of great use to the poetry-challenged like me, who need help slowing down enough to take in what''s being said. It may not save the earth (though it will surely help), but nature poetry can help save you.”—Bill McKibben, author of American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

(Bill McKibben )

"John Felstiner’s study is a remarkable attempt to bring the rich tradition of nature poetry to our aid in the current and ongoing ecological crisis.  I find particularly moving his extraordinary range of sympathy for the very varied poets he discusses."—Harold Bloom

(Harold Bloom )

"It is John Felstiner''s unique vision of the nature poem as a bio-world in itself—holding safe for us what we have freely endangered—that gives this book a radiance of power and conviction. It also marks it out as of central importance in the developing conversation on poetry and the environment."—Eavan Boland, author of An Origin Like Water

(Eavan Boland )

“This is a remarkable volume that tells us something about poetry, and a lot about the earth—no small achievement.”—The Weekly Standard

(The Weekly Standard )

"[Gary] Snyder''s characteristically astute endorsement of the book on its back cover, praising Felstiner''s ''deep reflections'' on poets ''seeing the actual world'' and telling ''the story of the earth'' is an accurate assessment of the book, which is not only a ''field guide'' but also, like Edward Thomas accompanying Robert Frost in the Glouscestershire countryside, a companion one would like to walk with when exploring new places or revisiting fond familiar ones. . . . Thoughts along these lines are a testament to what Felstiner''s book accomplishes and another of the reasons why it would be appropriate for compilers of introductory textbooks to follow its form, content, and aspirations."—Leon Lewis, Magill''s Literary Annual 2010

(Leon Lewis Magill's Literary Annual 2010 )

"This book is an important addition to the study of English and American poetry, and a worthy Field Guide to Nature Poetry at the same time. Can Poetry Save the Earth? is the book I wanted to write, but John Felstiner beat me to it."—Dennis Fritzinger, Warrior Poets

(Dennis Fritzinger Warrior Poets )

About the Author

John Felstiner, from Stanford University, wrote the prize-winning Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew and Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 440 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; First Edition edition (April 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300137508
• ISBN-13: 978-0300137507
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #636,067 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Here's the link to a bio:

http://english.stanford.edu/bio.php?name_id=49

And here's the link to my current book, now in much less expensive paperback, "Can Poetry Save the Earth? / A Field Guide to Nature Poems," which includes reviews, blurbs, etc.:

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300137507

I'm adding 3 items: my Paul Celan anthology, my Norton anthology "Jewish American Literature," and a chapbook called "Looking for Kafka."

My email: [e-mail]

John

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thank you, John Felstiner, May 1, 2009

By 

W. Stroup (Keene, NH USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems (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!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Iconic book for lyrical nature poetry, July 14, 2009

By 

P. Hunt (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems (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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "nature is never spent"-G.M.Hopkins; Review by Dr. Don Foran, January 14, 2010

By 

Don J. Foran (Olympia, WA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems (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.