Looking at the world----poetry and the environment

This is written by Bridget who is an author on this blog but was unable to post at the moment.

Looking at the World is the title of an anthology about poetry and the environment which was started some years ago by me and my husband. He was an environmentalist and I was teaching literature. We found we liked the same kind of poetry, the kind which presented directly the world around us, the natural landscape of trees, rivers, mountains and also the creatures which inhabited this world, cats- big and small- birds, fish. In a different way we also appreciated poems about the built environment , walls, buildings, mines, cities. We included poems about the weather and the changing seasons. We also found poems about pollution and the ultimate pollution, war.

Of course you could say that all poetry has an environment, but what seemed to be coming together in the anthology was a collection of poems where the world around had an impact on human life. It may be by the beauty of nature as in Wordsworth or Robert Frost or Denise Levertov. Or there's a witty poem by Philip Hobsbaum where he and his wife have finally to leave an apartment because of a succession of visitations by insects! DHLawrence experiences shame when he throws a stick after a snake; Robinson Jeffers shoots a hurt hawk, saying 'I gave it the lead gift in the twilight'.

Poets show this interrelationship and how very different the human psyche is in the mountains from the overcrowded city. The environment matters. The ecomomic plight of a woman, imprisoned in her attic by the need to sew to earn bread is vividly shown in 'The Song of the Shirt' written in the early nineteenth century. She would like to go out but daren't indulge in 'the walk that costs a meal'

There's a lot of argument in these poems. Sixteenth century poets start a debate about whether or not we can live in the country; Milton shows an argument about whether we should go for all -out consuming of natural resources or whether it's better to distribute fairly. And is war, which paradoxically brought us phyically closer to the earth, ever good?

This leads to another debate: who will save the earth we live in now? Why do socialists and environmentalists so rarely work together? Are we going to leave the problems of climate change in the hands of politicians with vested interests? Why do socialists seem to wince at that very term and others like it? By the way what happened to the discussions about peak oil?

Barney, my husband died eight years ago. For a while I did nothing on the anthology but now I'm trying to get it ready for the publishers. I believe that many of us are in danger of being blind to the environment, and what this anthology intends is to draw our attention back to the world around us. It should give pleasure too. I could quote from a hundred of the poems included, but I'd like to show this short lyric by an Irish lighthouse keeper looking back on his life:

Memories

Having lived in a lighthouse
On a bare rock
Surrounded by sea
For most of my life
And now retired.

The thing I remember
Is dense fog clearing
At the turn of high tide;
And the stars coming out
Like primroses in the sky.
D.J.O'Sullivan

He was a man who never stopped noticing things about the world around him. Here the power of his image gives that memory to us as well.