Earth Prayers: Encounters in Poetry with the Natural World

by Carol Ann Duffy

‘Carol Ann Duffy is the most humane and accessible poet of our time’ - GuardianCarol Ann Duffy brings together an anthology of one hundred modern and classic poems which capture moments of revelation, empathy or difference with the non-human and, in doing so, prompt us to rethink our place in the world.Vita Sackville-West encounters a frog by torchlight and Norman MacCaig, famously, addresses a toad. Simon Armitage kicks and demolishes a mushroom while Charlotte Mew mourns the cutting-down of elms in her London Street. Keats is transported by the nightingale and Edward Thomas by nettles. Les Murray eulogises his runner-beans and Liz Lochhead tells us what the pool said on midsummer’s day.With poems from Shakespeare to Bishop and Heaney, Chaucer to Hopkins, out-of-copyright poems, to poems from diverse cultures, Green Epiphanies will be a glorious new anthology for everyone who loves the world and the life it sustains.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

Expected publication March 3, 2026

About the author

Dame Carol Ann Duffy, DBE, FRSL is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Britain's Poet Laureate in May 2009.

She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly LGBT person to hold this position.

Her collections include Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Rapture (2005), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize.

Her poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence, in an accessible language that has made them popular in schools.

Reviews

[Katie Mercer · Rating 4 out of 5]

i haven’t read a full poetry work in ages and xanthe gave me this one that felt like beautiful place to start. grounding in nature always feels like home <3