Product Description

This volume comprises 190 poems by 133 poets: old favourites such as Tennyson's "The Song of the Brook" and Wordworth's "Upon Westminster Bridge" are joined by 20th-century poetry from both sides of the Atlantic, with writers including A.R. Ammon, Wendell Berry, Carol Ann Duffy, U.A. Fanthorpe, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Andrew Motion, Sylvia Plath and William Carlos Williams. Poets muse on the particularity of rivers, use the river as a metaphor for life's journey, and explore the magical qualities of water, its transformations and patterns. Yet our rivers are in retreat from a post-war onslaught of de-naturing: lowering of water tables, draining of water meadows, chopping down of trees and destroying wildlife habitats. This book reasserts the timeless importance of rivers to our environment, to the poetic imagination and indeed to life itself

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #651817 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

- New Scientist
"Go just three days without water, and your body is in trouble. We need trhe stuff, and not just for physical sustenance. Fresh water provides us with 'metaphor, power and enchantment', as 'The River's Voice', a collection of more than 180 poems from both sides of the Atlantic, so beautifully reminds us.

Chosen by Angela King and Susan Clifford, founder directors of arts/environment charity Common Ground, this book makes you wonder anew why we rteat our rivers and streams so abominably. It reminds us that rivers matter, not least because 'their fate is intricately intertwined with ours - naturally and culturally.' . . .Dive into this stunning anthology, and water will never again be just something out of a tap."

Excerpted from The River's Voice by Angela King, Susan Clifford. Copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Preface The River Meander must be a wonderful sight, its Turkish curves so tantalising that it has given the English language a verb and a noun. King Tantalos, up to his neck in Phrygian water that receded whenever he bent his head to drink, gave us the teasing verb. Intricate language and stories hang in the air, condensing when needed to enrich another place. Springs and great rivers-and all those bournes, becks, burns and brooks in between-not only provide us with our basic requirement for life, but have helped us to explain and to share knowledge of the world around us.

The real rivers, which may terrorise or delight us, are intriguing for their particularity. The variegation found in a single river valley and the differences among catchments are part of the great workings of nature, time and geology, and the efforts that we humans have made to control and use water for our own ends.

Even in England, where we had learnt to share the power of the stream with wild creatures and plants, leating it to drive mills, diverting it to flood meadows, damming it to pacify and to please, some of our activities are having profound implications. Through two centuries of industrialisation, we have turned our back on the city river; in only five decades, intensifying farming practices have filled the country river with chemicals; engineering has straightened the meanders, rendering the river more, not less, unpredictable. Fashions in fear, and development, have conspired to push running water away from our everyday experience, increasingly reducing streams to ditches and finally to culverts. The explosion in the working and domestic use of water is depleting aquifers, those banks of ancient water, and causing the drying up of streams. And the selling of common water into corporate hands is surely the retreat of the millennium.

We are united in our need for water, but are increasingly divided by its scarcity, its profusion-or big ideas for its use. Think of Aral, the biggest lake in central Asia, which is now dry, and of the huge dams along the Hwang Ho; contemplate the impact of shrinking polar ice caps and retreating glaciers in the Rockies and Himalayas. Then look at the spring, stream or river that is the reason why your settlement is where it is.

At the very moment when we need the closeness of water to feed our humanity and imagination, we seem to be denied literal contact, and have lost sight and sound of its magic.

Our aspiration in bringing together mainly twentieth-century poetry in this anthology is to demonstrate a richness-seen and heard by keen observers with the capacity to distil ideas, language, and stories-which continues to offer a route to our own imaginations.

What the poems also show is our willingness to be inspired by the particularity of actual rivers. One simple observation links ancient wisdoms with fractal science, aesthetic observation with the seepage of language and names: 'All rivers, small or large, agree in one character, they like to lean a little on one side.' (John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing, 1857.) Common Ground's work is based upon an idea of getting there better in the long run by going the long way round. Susan Clifford and Angela King Common Ground October 1999