Earth Prayers

’Carol Ann Duffy is the most humane and accessible poet of our time’ - Guardian

The wonders of nature have inspired poets for centuries, stretching far back beyond the Romantics. Beautifully curated by Carol Ann Duffy, the poems in Earth Prayers span widely across time, but in their moments of joy, empathy or difference, even the earliest poems reveal a concern for the welfare of our planet. Duffy brings these early eco-poems into conversation with contemporary voices writing into the environmental crisis, and through this dialogue sounds a clarion call to cherish and defend the planet while we can.

From John Clare to Lucille Clifton to Kathleen Jamie, the poets collected in Earth Prayers speak at times as stewards and ambassadors of the earth, at others in anger at those who would exploit nature, or to question their own part in its decline. And the earth speaks back: in Stephanie Pruitt’s ’Mississippi Gardens’ the soil bears witness to the worst of human history, while in ’Poem’ Jorie Graham relays the earth’s plea: ’remember me’.

To encounter nature, these poems tell us, is to be humbled, to have our own smallness magnified by the presence of the sublime. Earth Prayers is a testament to the immense beauty of the natural world, and a challenging reminder of our place in ’the living skein / of which the world is woven’.

Carol Ann Duffy lives in Manchester, where she is Professor and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her poetry has received many awards, including the Signal Prize for Children’s Verse, the Whitbread, Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, and the Lannan and E. M. Forster Prize in America. She was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 2009 to 2019. Her many collections include Mean Time, Love Poems and The Bees, which won the Costa Poetry Award. Her writing for children includes Queen Munch and Queen Nibble, The Skipping-Rope Snake andThe Tear Thief. She was made a DBE in the 2015 New Year Honours list. In 2021, she was awarded the international lifetime achievement award the Golden Wreath for her achievements in poetry.