Ruby Street

As anyone who knows me realises, I'm not a one for any common or garden poetry anthology, but I picked up one today which is quite intriguing. It's called The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet edited by British poet Alice Oswald . The fact that its selections are from poets such as Ashbery, Marinetti, Ponge, Popa, Beckett and Bunting as well as Auden, Hopkins, Clare, Heaney and Burns as well as the prolific Anon, is of interest. I suppose you could call it an anthology of 'nature' poetry. I am always wary of the concept of 'nature' - I ask 'what is natural?' and then get into political debates, or wonder why people point at 'nature' away from human. Nonetheless, I was interested in the 'ecopoetics' of this selection. And the more obvious anthology pieces (say 'God's Grandeur' or excerpts from 'Leaves of Grass') work along with Aboriginal song cycle poems. Or John Barleycorn, as interesting as any a work of eco...

I contemplate my modern soul not too much. There's something of steel in the sky and it bears down through clearances of blue. I’ve tried stepping into the same sea twice, or more, and nearly drowned in the shallows. The sand occupies me with its waywardness, its withholding of evidence, debrading millions of dead skeletons. The crust is temporary but the wind taps each wing of a high albatross. A headland is always that far, a lighthouse flashes with some ghost climbing. The rocky beach is littered with fur seals. Danger moves in their sleepy regard and their bloodied necks. I realise stepping here is wrong as well. But the wind is cold and sometimes that’s enough.

I've just come across Jeff Davis's blog called Natures, . I'm glad I did. I was actually tracking down some information on Thomas Meyer when it turned up. So, first of all, there's references to Meyer and to Creeley and others. There are some good considered things here including, for starters, an entry tackling poetry and music which, as a poet who makes much musical reference and with a concern for the sonics of poetry, I found useful - thinking in terms of sound forms and the lexical. I liked that 'natures' is the plural, rather than the grandiose Nature.

All we killers raking air out of lungs and the trees. Although I’ve no force I comply breaking the chain removing dirt and odours the while with petrochemical skin that lights up and in my hair the slippery molecules and plastic roots. As if efficiency was enough god and out of the tar pits you raise the candle.

It's a straitened time for me, like the era parched and full of small agonies related to bewilderment My pumice mind abrades its home there are no more arbors You hear each day alive in its runnels a kind of delirious boredom that, sure can variegate at times So you might need an up-to-date glossary or something shiny above the wall a wing off the sun blithe in the way it's taken you up again in ferment of air, it's not pure but it moves