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

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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!

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.

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.

In each chapter of this beautifully written book, Felstiner walks with his readers through great nature poems from every age, connecting us at once with our literary legacy, our language and our place in the natural world. Vivid biographical portraits of the poets and quotes from journals, letters, interviews and other sources bring the poets to life as they celebrate and fear for their treasured landscapes. With its deep clear readings of poems and detailed discussion of poetic craft, this book is a must-read for anyone with interests in art and environmentalism. I bought a second copy to give to my daughter, a college freshman, as she assumes the ecological responsibilities that are falling to her and her generation.

If you love this, you'll also love Sow by Tanya Rucosky Noakes and Into the Cool: The Collected Poems of David Saxton, 1992 Through 2007.