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100 Poems to Save the Earth
100 Poems to Save the Earth is a concise, eclectic, and engaging anthology of poems in English addressing the climate crisis, edited by Welsh poets and enviromentalists Zoë Brigley and Kristian Evans and including poems from America, UK, Ireland, and beyond, such as Roger Robinson, Rhian Edwards, Tishani Doshi, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and George Szirtes.
- GenresPoetry
190 pages, Paperback
Published September 28, 2021
2 people are currently reading
33 people want to read
About the author
Zoë Brigley
21 books54 followersZoë Brigley is the author of three books of poetry published by Bloodaxe: Hand & Skull (2019), Conquest (2012), and The Secret (2007). All three are UK Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Poems from the collections have won an Eric Gregory Award for the best British poets under 30, have been longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize for the best international writers under 40, and were Forward Prize commended.
She has also published a collection of nonfiction essays: Notes from a Swing State: Writing from Wales and America (Parthian 2019), which was well received in reviews. Her most recent chapbooks include: Aubade After A French Movie (Broken Sleep, 2020), Into Eros (Verve, 2021), and Lycanthrope (Salò Press, 2024). She collaborated with Kristian Evans for a prose chapbook Otherworlds: Writing on Nature and Magic (Broken Sleep 2021), and with Jenny Mitchell and Roy McFarlane for the forthcoming Family Name (Nine Pens, 2023).
Her writing appears in publications like Australian Book Review, Chicago Review, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Poetry Ireland Review, Orion, Poetry Review, PN Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Copper Nickel, and Waxwing.
She researches literature, film, trauma, and representations of violence. She co-edited the academic volume Feminism, Literature, and Rape Narratives (with Sorcha Gunne). Her research articles appear in The Journal of Gender Studies, Feminist Formations, Feminist Media Studies, Gender and Education, and Contemporary Women’s Writing. For a number of years, she produced a podcast with her students on anti-violence advocacy at SinisterMyth.com .
She became editor for Wales’ leading poetry journal Poetry Wales in 2021, and she is now Poetry Editor for Seren Books jointly with the poet Rhian Edwards. She was also an editor for Magma Poetry, a special issue on ‘Dwelling’ in 2021 with Kristian Evans and Rob Mackenzie. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she also curated Dwelling During the Pandemic: An Ohio Poetry Project.
With Kristian Evans, she was co-editor of the Seren anthology 100 Poems to Save the Earth (Seren 2021), and together they founded MODRON: Writing on the Ecological Crisis, which she works on with Evans and editors Taz Rahman, Siân Melangell Dafydd, and Glyn Edwards.
Zoë is a disabled writer; she is deaf and identifies as neurodivergent.
She has also published a collection of nonfiction essays: Notes from a Swing State: Writing from Wales and America (Parthian 2019), which was well received in reviews. Her most recent chapbooks include: Aubade After A French Movie (Broken Sleep, 2020), Into Eros (Verve, 2021), and Lycanthrope (Salò Press, 2024). She collaborated with Kristian Evans for a prose chapbook Otherworlds: Writing on Nature and Magic (Broken Sleep 2021), and with Jenny Mitchell and Roy McFarlane for the forthcoming Family Name (Nine Pens, 2023).
Her writing appears in publications like Australian Book Review, Chicago Review, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Poetry Ireland Review, Orion, Poetry Review, PN Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Copper Nickel, and Waxwing.
She researches literature, film, trauma, and representations of violence. She co-edited the academic volume Feminism, Literature, and Rape Narratives (with Sorcha Gunne). Her research articles appear in The Journal of Gender Studies, Feminist Formations, Feminist Media Studies, Gender and Education, and Contemporary Women’s Writing. For a number of years, she produced a podcast with her students on anti-violence advocacy at SinisterMyth.com .
She became editor for Wales’ leading poetry journal Poetry Wales in 2021, and she is now Poetry Editor for Seren Books jointly with the poet Rhian Edwards. She was also an editor for Magma Poetry, a special issue on ‘Dwelling’ in 2021 with Kristian Evans and Rob Mackenzie. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she also curated Dwelling During the Pandemic: An Ohio Poetry Project.
With Kristian Evans, she was co-editor of the Seren anthology 100 Poems to Save the Earth (Seren 2021), and together they founded MODRON: Writing on the Ecological Crisis, which she works on with Evans and editors Taz Rahman, Siân Melangell Dafydd, and Glyn Edwards.
Zoë is a disabled writer; she is deaf and identifies as neurodivergent.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 11, 2021
I've sat on this review for a few days, basically since the IPCC Climate report was released. It is a very scary situation we are in, and I feel frustrated at times because I believe more can be done very easily. More can be done by our governments but also on an individual level.
Climate change needs to be talked about. Change has to happen. Because we must do better. Our home depends on it. It's as simple as that. Without the earth there is no us. There is nothing. This isn't a worry for the next generation. It's for now. Today.
I enjoyed this collection, some poems were hard to read or they didn’t speak to me. I particularly enjoyed the ones that told a story rather than an abstract idea I couldn’t quite grasp. But I found many beautiful and the words powerful. I’ve always loved nature poetry and this collection spoke to me on many levels. It highlights the power of words and conversation and how it can make a difference.
I took inspiration and started a conversation in my workplace, in a few days we've created a space for all to join, to share tips on making changes in our daily lives, I'm putting together a proposal for how we can become a more carbon neutral workplace. At home, I already recycle a lot and am vegan but I've improved my own recycling habits by sourcing drop offs where I can bring my hard to recycle items for Terracycle programmes that aren't widely available in NI.
Small actions by many will make a difference.
Climate change needs to be talked about. Change has to happen. Because we must do better. Our home depends on it. It's as simple as that. Without the earth there is no us. There is nothing. This isn't a worry for the next generation. It's for now. Today.
I enjoyed this collection, some poems were hard to read or they didn’t speak to me. I particularly enjoyed the ones that told a story rather than an abstract idea I couldn’t quite grasp. But I found many beautiful and the words powerful. I’ve always loved nature poetry and this collection spoke to me on many levels. It highlights the power of words and conversation and how it can make a difference.
I took inspiration and started a conversation in my workplace, in a few days we've created a space for all to join, to share tips on making changes in our daily lives, I'm putting together a proposal for how we can become a more carbon neutral workplace. At home, I already recycle a lot and am vegan but I've improved my own recycling habits by sourcing drop offs where I can bring my hard to recycle items for Terracycle programmes that aren't widely available in NI.
Small actions by many will make a difference.
January 18, 2022
This is a fascinating anthology, for a number of reasons. The first is, perhaps, the breadth of knowledge of contemporary poetry displayed by the editors who have compiled it for Seren. They have scoured not only well-trodden poetical paths, but much less well-known by-ways too. In this way they have brought to the reader’s attention poetry which might otherwise have escaped her notice.
If you don’t read a lot of work by living poets, then this is a perfect opportunity to flit and sip among the many, incredibly varied, very talented, poets working today. I found friends, favourites and heroes amongst the contributors (sometimes all at once). I read new work by people whose work I have on my bookshelf, and whose readings I have attended over the years. There is also work from poets whose Zoom readings I have enjoyed over the past two years. Poetry does not sleep in these parlous times. Poetry being written and published now is engaged, vibrant, and has important things to say.
Not only do the poetical forms used by the poets in 100 Poems run the gamut, they explore the theme in its broadest senses. The editors’ introduction is a powerful polemic for what follows. However, even by such a variety of hands, 100 poems purely on demonstrably environmental and/or ecological issues, unleavened, would’ve perhaps been a bit much. 100 poems is a lot of poems. I did find the reasons for including some of the poems a little opaque. But each poem has something of importance to say on its own terms.
This is, perhaps, a book to be dipped into over time. I read poetry on the loo (don’t judge me), because I find that the perfect particle of time to read a poem (aloud) and think about it before resuming my day. This one took four months to read in that way. If you hurl yourself at it I fear you may find it has much the same effect as a Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster might (yes, I am that old: again, don’t judge me).
This much I believe is indisputable: poetry has an important role to play in conserving the earth, alongside the other arts – which are lining up alongside science in the battle to save it. Never has poetry been more available, more about ‘now’, and created by more, talented, people. As an artistic form for modern people with three-minute attention spans, poetry is of course the perfect, persuasive tool to use to save the Earth. Seren, the publisher of this book, rides the forefront of the new wave of poetry and this book enhances their already excellent reputation.
This anthology is a perfect example of what modern poetry can do and I recommend it to you heartily.
If you enjoy this, I recommend to you also Merryn Williams’ compilation Poems For The Year 2020: Eighty Poets On The Pandemic which ranges both broadly and deeply over our current Covid Times. (Full disclosure: I’ve got a poem in that one.)
If you don’t read a lot of work by living poets, then this is a perfect opportunity to flit and sip among the many, incredibly varied, very talented, poets working today. I found friends, favourites and heroes amongst the contributors (sometimes all at once). I read new work by people whose work I have on my bookshelf, and whose readings I have attended over the years. There is also work from poets whose Zoom readings I have enjoyed over the past two years. Poetry does not sleep in these parlous times. Poetry being written and published now is engaged, vibrant, and has important things to say.
Not only do the poetical forms used by the poets in 100 Poems run the gamut, they explore the theme in its broadest senses. The editors’ introduction is a powerful polemic for what follows. However, even by such a variety of hands, 100 poems purely on demonstrably environmental and/or ecological issues, unleavened, would’ve perhaps been a bit much. 100 poems is a lot of poems. I did find the reasons for including some of the poems a little opaque. But each poem has something of importance to say on its own terms.
This is, perhaps, a book to be dipped into over time. I read poetry on the loo (don’t judge me), because I find that the perfect particle of time to read a poem (aloud) and think about it before resuming my day. This one took four months to read in that way. If you hurl yourself at it I fear you may find it has much the same effect as a Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster might (yes, I am that old: again, don’t judge me).
This much I believe is indisputable: poetry has an important role to play in conserving the earth, alongside the other arts – which are lining up alongside science in the battle to save it. Never has poetry been more available, more about ‘now’, and created by more, talented, people. As an artistic form for modern people with three-minute attention spans, poetry is of course the perfect, persuasive tool to use to save the Earth. Seren, the publisher of this book, rides the forefront of the new wave of poetry and this book enhances their already excellent reputation.
This anthology is a perfect example of what modern poetry can do and I recommend it to you heartily.
If you enjoy this, I recommend to you also Merryn Williams’ compilation Poems For The Year 2020: Eighty Poets On The Pandemic which ranges both broadly and deeply over our current Covid Times. (Full disclosure: I’ve got a poem in that one.)
July 7, 2024
3.5 stars.
I am finding it hard to review this. I am not the most experienced with poetry collections, and I probably should have spent more time with each poem. However, my overall impression was that this was filled with a lot of poems that moved me, but also a lot of poems that didn't hit me very hard. I think this was kind of inevitable, especially with a collection of 100 different poems from 100 different poets. Liking all of them would have been strange. I think it will be interesting to see how my opinion changes with time, as I will probably return to this sometime in the future.
My favourites in no particular order were:
Trophic Cascade
(first trimester)
The Magician
To Know Green from Green
September
I Kicked a Mushroom
Gone Into the Garden
I am finding it hard to review this. I am not the most experienced with poetry collections, and I probably should have spent more time with each poem. However, my overall impression was that this was filled with a lot of poems that moved me, but also a lot of poems that didn't hit me very hard. I think this was kind of inevitable, especially with a collection of 100 different poems from 100 different poets. Liking all of them would have been strange. I think it will be interesting to see how my opinion changes with time, as I will probably return to this sometime in the future.
My favourites in no particular order were:
Trophic Cascade
(first trimester)
The Magician
To Know Green from Green
September
I Kicked a Mushroom
Gone Into the Garden
May 22, 2025
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
a lovely collection
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
a lovely collection
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews