Review of climate poetry anthologies, ‘Count Every Breath’ and ‘Greening the Earth’

In 1798, when Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published their iconic collection, Lyrical Ballads, they effectively launched a manifesto in the Preface, celebrating the appeal of the “ordinary”. It was a bold move, considering that heroic couplets and epic themes were the flavour of 18th century British poetry. 

By training their own, and readers’, attention to the joys and sorrows of everyday life, Wordsworth and Coleridge reinvented the poet’s role in public life. It was no longer enough for poets to dazzle with boombast. Instead, they had to build bridges between readers and the fast-changing world they lived in, with the Industrial Revolution wreaking havoc over rural and urban landscapes all over Europe.

Two centuries later, as rampant consumerism continues to dig its talons ever deeper into the fabric of society, poets (indeed, artists of all descriptions) are taking fresh stock of the damages being wrought on nature by humans. Climate-action poetry, eco-literature, call it what you will, is forcing us to reckon with subjects that Wordsworth and Coleridge once labelled “ordinary”, and look at them from an all-new perspective. What used to be ordinary — nature in all its glory, All things bright and beautiful/ All creatures great and small — is becoming scarce, as species of flora and fauna become extinct from the planet.

Clarion call

Two recent anthologies address the devastating impact of this vanishing natural world by bringing together a multitude of poetic voices from across the globe, writing in a range of languages. Count Every Breath: A Climate Anthology, edited by Vinita Agrawal, is a slim, albeit uneven, collection. Theme-driven anthologies are often susceptible to setting a template for writers to pursue a single agenda with dogged earnestness. In several poems in this volume, such a tendency results in trite attempts at rhyming lines rather than poems (Salil Tripathi’s ‘The Problem Is Yours Now’, for instance). But thankfully, there are exceptions that more than make up for the disappointments.

The hint of menace in Mani Rao’s sparse lines in ‘Lately, the Colour of Water’, the limpid grace of Medha Singh’s ‘Rewilding’ (All I want in the anxiety and aimlessness of world/ and ecstasy is the courage of gardens that endure/ the quiver of time), and the arresting imagery in poems by Michele D’Costa, Pratisthya Pandya and Sridala Swami stay with the reader.

Greening the Earth: A Global Anthology of Poetry, edited by K. Satchidanandan and Nishi Chawla, is a heftier volume, not only for its girth but also the seriousness of its curation. To begin with, the editors don’t shy away from grappling with a tough question: what role can poetry play in a world besieged with climate crisis? “The writer’s world is not only the social world,” they argue, “but the ecosphere itself.” The answer to fixing our broken world isn’t in “museumising” nature through eco-parks and conservation projects. Rather, we must feel a deep sense of urgency, an emotional pull to soil and sun. We need “a shock” to our systems, which have become indifferent to the ravages of industrialisation.

Balancing act

Spanning geography and language, the selected poems live up to these lofty aims. Ricardo Bellveser’s ‘Plant Growth’, translated from the Spanish by Nishi Chawla, ends with a haunting declaration: We only understand/ that time has passed, when/ everything stops and all of a sudden winter comes. P.N. Gopikrishnan’s Malayalam poem ‘How Does An ‘Un’ Get Added to Our Ease’, translated by Satchidanandan, sparkles with aphoristic wisdom: What we call a tree is also/ the mark of a vanished forest. Geoffrey Himes writes with scathing exactitude about the rot in us: The swamp swallows everything, nutritious and noxious alike./…We too swallow the tasty and the toxic.

The beauty of the poems in Greening the Earth comes from their delicate dance between poignant tragedy and ironic indictment. Thanks to global warming/ an Inuit community/ up in the Arctic Circle/ sees its first ever wasp, Penelope Shuttle writes in ‘Wasp’. She unfurls this striking thought over the next eight lines, closing with haiku-like concision, with the stunning image of a Japanese sex doll.

Almost all the poems in this volume handle diction and form with a bold confidence. In some, the two come together to create magic. Vivek Narayanan’s ‘Chitrakuta’, for instance, based on an episode in Valmiki’s Ramayana, takes us back in time, only to remind us of our current predicament. In the beginning, the gods accepted man/ as a victim, the poet writes, Later the ability to be sacrificed/ passed from him into antelope and horse./ From horse into cattle, from cattle/ into sheep, from sheep into goat, then from/ goats into the earth, so all the world/ was touched by our humility, our/ complicity.

Few lines capture the reality of the world we live in with such precision, grief, and subtlety.

The writer is based in Delhi.