Tag Archive for: Earth

Rebel Talk | Extinction Rebellion

Responding to a call from poet Rip Bulkeley’s call, sixty-three poets contributed to the anthology Rebel Talk. As Philip Gross’s Foreword explains, the poems “…seek to show what, uniquely, these times are, and why it is once again so urgent that creative artists respond to the challenges they pose, in particular to the climate emergency.

Each poem is an individual response to this challenge: as a collection, they possess a wealth of language and imagery, by turns hard, laconic, diamond sharp, down-to-earth, tender, urgently lyrical. What are these times? Almost – not quite – too late.”

Rebel Talk is divided into six chapters, exploring themes and emotions which draw together responses to the climate emergency. The opening chapter, ‘Earth’, rejoices and grounds itself in nature’s diversity and cosmic unity. Here is a vision of a natural world which we can recognise and respect, in which we can flourish and thrive because we know what we must do to make sure we don’t damage it.

,

Letters to the Earth | introduced by Emma Thompson

How can we begin to talk about what is happening to the world? How can we explain to our children, and to ourselves, what the future of our planet might look and feel like? Letters to the Earth is the beginning of a new conversation. One that attempts to answer some of these questions by listening to the voices of parents and children; politicians and poets; songwriters and scientists. Gathering together over 100 letters written in response to a callout from Culture Declares Emergency, each entry begins to give language to the unspeakable, and shows how our collective power is present when we are ready to slow down and listen to each other.

It’s natural to feel worried or concerned about what the future of the earth holds. These letters are an opportunity to reflect on our connection to the planet and the way it faithfully sustains us. But they are also an opportunity to act, to respond to this crisis. To put pen to paper and make your voice heard.

A collection of 100 letters from around the world responding to the climate crisis, illustrated by CILIP award winner Jackie Morris. Includes contributions from activist Yoko Ono, actor Mark Rylance, poet Kae Tempest, author (of Rebel Library favourite The Ice) Laline Paull, illustrator of The Lost Words Jackie Morris, novelist Anna Hope, environmental writer Jay Griffiths and Green Party MP Caroline Lucas.

The conversation is still going, so get in on it: submit your own Letter to the Earth here.

Earth Dwellers | Kristen Lang

The Anthropocene – what can poetry do in this epoch in the Earth’s history defined by human impact? With its immersion in powerful wilderness landscapes, Earth Dwellers challenges our human-centredness by embracing perspectives which set the intimate delicacy of life forms against time scales that go back millions of years. These are deep-breath poems, full of touch and awareness, consolidated by their commitment to the ecologies that envelop us.

Asked where we come from, the poems speak not of nations or tribes but of mosses, mountains, oceans, birds. And asked where we are going, the poems refer not to rockets or recessions, but to the biome, a place where consumption is a relationship and not a right. This is ecopoetry – where the natural world is primary, and humans have to find their place in it, rather than the other way around.

,

Earth | David Brin

Decades from now, an artificial black hole has fallen into the Earth’s core. As scientists frantically work to prevent the ultimate disaster, they discover that the entire planet could be destroyed within a year.

But while they look for an answer, some claim that the only way to save Earth is to let its human inhabitants become extinct: to reset the evolutionary clock and start over.

‘This book is not just a green globe-trotting adventure; it is also a thoughtful mix of warnings and promise.” – The Guardian

 

Read our Librarian’s top climate change fiction picks by heading to our Fiction section

This Fruiting Body | Caleb Parkin

Caleb Parkin’s debut poetry collection, This Fruiting Body, plunges us into octopus raves and Sega Megadrive oceans, in the company of Saab hermit crabs and ASDA pride gnomes. It’s a playful invitation to a queer ecopoetics that permeates our bodies and speech, our gardens, homes, and city suburbs. It reintroduces us to a Nature we’ve dragged up until it’s unrecognisable.

Parkin’s perceptive poetry sparks with neon visuals, engaged in the joyful, urgent, imagining of alternative realities and new futures. How might we relate queerly and dearly to our environment and its shared conundrums? These adventurous poems delight in human and nonhuman intimacies, teem with life, ponder bug sex and put masculinities under the microscope. This Fruiting Body roves our grandiloquent planet, embracing our kinships with matter, culture, creatures and drag-mother Earth herself.

“Unwriting and rewriting our myths of ‘nature’, This Fruiting Body is a thrilling collection of queer love songs for the earth. Parkin’s femme earth mother may be on an IV drip, but she wears her artifice with joy and audacity: this is mother earth, drag queen of the universe, a body aching from harm but still devoted to pleasure. Parkin’s poems are infinitely lavish and full of wit, morphing human and more-than-human bodies in a post-human lyric disco lit with ecological thought. I felt better and wetter after reading it: more open to the press of language, life, and the strangeness of the earth.” – Samantha Walton

 

Purchase This Fruiting Body from Nine Arches Press

 

,

The Man with the Compound Eyes | Wu Ming-Yi

‘You must love the land, my children, and ring it in with your love.’ On the island of Wayo Wayo, every second son must leave on the day he turns fifteen as a sacrifice to the Sea God. Atile’i, however, is determined to defy destiny and become the first to survive. Across the sea, Alice Shih’s life is interrupted when a vast trash vortex comes crashing onto the shore of Taiwan, bringing Atile’i with it.

In the aftermath of the catastrophe, Atile’i and Alice retrace her late husband’s footsteps into the mountains, hoping to solve the mystery of her son’s disappearance. On their journey, memories will be challenged, an unusual bond formed, and a dark secret uncovered that will force Alice to question everything she thought she knew.

‘A haunting and evocative tale, beautifully told. I wept at the description of the dying whales and the approaching tsunami… I think this work will be a classic.’ Hugh Howey, author of Wool

 

See more from Penguin Vintage Earth

,

The Last Quarter of the Moon | Chi Zijian

‘A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them.’

At the end of the twentieth century an old woman sits among the birch trees and reflects on the joys and tragedies that have befallen her people. A member of the Evenki tribe who wander the forests of north-eastern China, hers was a life lived in close sympathy with nature at its most beautiful and cruel.

Then, in the 1930s, the intimate, secluded world of the tribe is shattered when the Japanese army invades China. The Evenki cannot avoid being pulled into the brutal conflict that marks the beginning of the end of life as they know it.

‘An atmospheric modern folk-tale, the saga of the Evenki clan of Inner Mongolia – nomadic reindeer herders whose traditional life alongside the Argun river endured unchanged for centuries… This is a fitting tribute to the Evenki by a writer of rare talent’ Financial Times

 

See more from Penguin Vintage Earth

,

Solar | Ian McEwan

‘Beard sank into a gloom of inattention, not because the planet was in peril – that moronic word again – but because someone was telling him it was with such enthusiasm.’

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. He now spends his days speaking for enormous fees and half-heartedly heading a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time, she’s having the affair.

When Beard’s professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity arises for Beard to simultaneously save his marriage and the world from environmental disaster.

‘Savagely funny… Enormously entertaining.’ Sunday Times
‘A stunningly accomplished work, possibly his best yet.’ Financial Times

 

See more from Penguin Vintage Earth