Earth Days: Poems, Chants, and Spells in Five Directions

Annie Finch’s spellbinding poems give voice to the earth-centered spirituality of our era. Earth Days gathers her poems over five decades around the elements of fire (flame, sun, stars, heat, passion); air (moon, wind, light, wisdom); earth (mud, roots, mountain, tree, strength); water (ocean, river, rain, tears, heart); and matrix (intuition, mystery, ritual, spirit). Finch’s poems enchant the ear as well as the mind, combining her virtuosic use of poetic craft with a rhapsodic, transformative, and feminist postmodern sensibility. Dense and musically alive, this is poetry meant to be read aloud.

Publisher: Nirala Publications, Delhi, India
Publication Date: 2023
Pages: 172
Language: English
ISBN: 978-8196360115

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From The Publisher

This is the first collection of Finch’s poetry to be published outside of the U.S and gathers Finch’s most cherished poems along with previously uncollected new poems. Poems included in the book have appeared in leading periodicals including American Poetry ReviewHarvard ReviewHudson ReviewKenyon ReviewThe New RepublicThe New York TimesThe Paris ReviewPoetryPrairie Schooner, and The Yale Review.

Excerpt

EARTH DAY

All we want is to find the love
in the faces of the people we love.
All we need is to find the dark
in the nighttime sky, to lie down to sleep
in the darkness, where stars and moon keep vigil,
in the silence of a sleeping earth.
All we require is to wake to sunlight
in the morning, to simple sky,
to breathe aloud as the sky is breathing,
to drink the water of the earth.
​All we need is to touch the planet
and find it clean where we were born,
where our ancestors breathed and planted,
where we live with the plants and birds.
All we need is to live with the memory
of a future we want to imagine.
​All we want is to find the love
​in the face of the planet we love.

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