The Echoing Green

The rich poetic history of grass spans the centuries, from the pastoral poems of ancient Rome to the fields and prairies of the New World. The rapturous idealizations of William Blake's "echoing green" stand in vivid contrast to the obliterating work of grass on human battlefields in war poems such as John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields," or to the work of contemporary poets--Wendell Berry, Natalie Diaz, and Sherman Alexie, among them--who take on our relationship with nature in an age of environmental crisis. Here is a rich array of poets from around the world, including T'ao Ch'ien, Bashō, Andrew Marvell, Robert Burns, Victor Hugo, Christina Rossetti, Rainer Maria Rilke, Willa Cather, Ingeborg Bachmann, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Tomas Tranströmer, and Derek Walcott, in a dazzling celebration of our complicated relationship to the natural world.