I've just picked up a copy of Radial Symmetry by Katherine Larson (Yale University Press, 2011). It's the winner of this year's Kate Tufts Discovery Award and it was selected for the Yale Younger Poets Series by Louise Glück. It's a tremendous book, worthy of the honours it has received. I'm enjoying it, and it puts me in mind of some other poets, all women, who also write marvellously about the natural world, and I would like to share some of their books with you. This isn't meant to be an exhaustive reading list, but these are book that I have enjoyed, and they all seem to compliment one another. Let these be recommendations for anyone who has enjoyed at least one of these titles; if you liked one, then I'm sure the others will interest you, as well.
A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth by Stephanie Bolster (Brick Books, 2011).
Winterkill by Catherine Graham (Insomniac Press, 2010).
Inseminating the Elephant by Lucia Perillo (Copper Canyon Press, 2009).
Red Nest by Gillian Jerome (Nightwood Editions, 2009).
Twigs & Knucklebones by Sarah Lindsay (Copper Canyon Press, 2008).
Spectral Waves by Madeleine DeFrees (Copper Canyon Press, 2006).
Woods etc. by Alice Oswald (Faber and Faber, 2005).
Dream Work by Mary Oliver (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986).
Selected Poems by Amy Clampitt (Alfred A, Knopf, 2010).
Who would you add to this list?
3 comments:
a. rawlings Wide slumber for lepidopterists
Reporting from Night by Kateri Lanthier (Iguana Books, 2011). The natural world is everywhere present in these poems in surprising and vivid ways, rendered in precise and dazzling words and word play: trees, stones, clouds, stars, animals real and unreal. A wonderful new collection that I highly recommend.
Murder In The Dark,(Anansi) prose poems by Margaret Atwood, brilliant observations and language and we expect no less. Also, the 1984 G.G., Pat Lowther AND Gerald Lampert award-winning book from M&S, Celestial Navigation by Paulette Jiles. Check out 'Night Flight to Attiwapiskat' and other poems which have one hovering amongst the stars, seeing the cold salt coast and landing among earthmen, speaking Cree. Amazing energy and intellect in both these books. Time we had more such. Life is too short for limpid sighing stuff.
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