Earth lines

Where were you when you first encountered nature poetry? Perhaps you were in a school classroom; it was probably raining outside. Maybe your teacher held up a slightly dog-eared copy of Wordsworth and said something about iambic pentameter. Perhaps you turned your head to look out the window, where the rain was falling, and never picked up a poem again.

Even to speak of ‘nature poetry’ is to conjure up the slightly stuffy spectre of that English tradition – of Keats and his wild solitude, Wordsworth’s dancing daffodils, Shelley’s lonesome vales. We’re familiar with lines penned by Byron – – and ecstatic odes to wildlife by John Clare. These are poems inhabited by