The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses is a unique anthology of poetry about the natural world.
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 idealizations of William Blake’s “echoing green” and William Wordsworth’s “splendor in the grass” stand in vivid contrast to the obliterating greenery on human battlefields in war poems such as John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” and Carl Sandburg’s “Grass,” or to the work of contemporary poets—Lucia Perillo, Harryette Mullen, Denise Levertov, and Gary Soto among them—who reflect on an age of environmental crisis.
