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Earth Took of Earth: A Golden Ecco Anthology
"It really matters that great poems get written," crackles the wise remark attributed to Ezra Pound, "and it doesn't matter a damn who writes them." Taking her cue from Pound, Jorie Graham has fashioned an exhilarating collection of one hundred of the finest poems in the English language.
From Geoffrey Chaucer to Derek Walcott, Emily Bronte to James Merrill, Earth Took of Earth is an inclusive anthology that celebrates the diversity of language and theme over one thousand years of poetry. In doing so, it also tells the remarkable story of the evolution of a people and of its language.
As Graham writes in her introduction, "This is a book about the nature and force of Poetry itself. . . [one that tells] the story of how that force has rippled, burned, danced, clenched, raged, argued, persuaded, and generally exploded through one remarkable language over a thousand years of its usage. So here are some of the songs people - the custodians and inventors of a great language - have sung (have needed to sing) to keep themselves spiritually, morally, and emotionally awake."
From Geoffrey Chaucer to Derek Walcott, Emily Bronte to James Merrill, Earth Took of Earth is an inclusive anthology that celebrates the diversity of language and theme over one thousand years of poetry. In doing so, it also tells the remarkable story of the evolution of a people and of its language.
As Graham writes in her introduction, "This is a book about the nature and force of Poetry itself. . . [one that tells] the story of how that force has rippled, burned, danced, clenched, raged, argued, persuaded, and generally exploded through one remarkable language over a thousand years of its usage. So here are some of the songs people - the custodians and inventors of a great language - have sung (have needed to sing) to keep themselves spiritually, morally, and emotionally awake."
- GenresPoetry
282 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1996
About the author
Jorie Graham
59 books175 followersJorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.
Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Place (2012), Sea Change (2008), Overlord (2005), Never (2002), Swarm (2001), The Errancy (1997), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.
Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Place (2012), Sea Change (2008), Overlord (2005), Never (2002), Swarm (2001), The Errancy (1997), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.
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November 3, 2013
Crazy that this anthology wasn't kept in print. It chooses a hundred poems, from anonymous songs to the generation of poets born before 1928, to give a lovely and synoptic view of poetry in English for the ages. It's almost a form unto itself, and Graham introduces it with a sharp and intelligent essay. A coda includes a poem from Michael Palmer's Notes for Echo Lake sequence. I think it's terrific but apparently others did not because it went out of print with astonishing rapidity. Some small press should buy the rights from Ecco.
Displaying 1 of 1 review