Books
Anthologies first, because they are the fastest way in.
Anthologies — Ireland
Jane Clarke (ed.), Windfall: Irish Nature Poems to Inspire and Connect (Hachette Books Ireland, 2023). Illustrated by Jane Carkill. Includes Heaney, Boland, Longley, Meehan, Ní Dhomhnaill, Ní Chuilleanáin, Muldoon.
Alice Kinsella and Nessa O’Mahony (eds.), Empty House: Poetry and Prose on the Climate Crisis (Doire Press, 2021). Poetry and prose; launched on Earth Day 2021 with Friends of the Earth Ireland. → doirepress.com
Keith Payne, Lorna Shaughnessy and Martín Veiga (eds.), A Different Eden: Ecopoetry from Ireland and Galicia (Dedalus Press, 2021). Parallel texts in English, Irish and Galician. → NLI catalogue · Instituto Cervantes
Anthologies — international
Neil Astley (ed.), Earth Shattering: ecopoems (Bloodaxe, 2007). Over two hundred poems, global, strong on translation. → bloodaxebooks.com
Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street (eds.), The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2013; 2020 edition with a foreword by Craig Santos Perez). Introduction by Robert Hass. → tupress.org
Camille T. Dungy (ed.), Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2009). → ugapress.org
Melissa Tuckey (ed.), Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology (University of Georgia Press, 2018). → ugapress.org
Harriet Tarlo (ed.), The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011). → shearsman.com
John Burnside and Maurice Riordan (eds.), Wild Reckoning (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2004).
Zoë Brigley and Kristian Evans (eds.), 100 Poems to Save the Earth (Seren, 2021). → serenbooks.com
Kate Simpson (ed.), Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency (Valley Press, 2021) · Elizabeth J. Coleman (ed.), Here: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon, 2019) · Karen McCarthy Woolf and Mona Arshi (eds.), Nature Matters (Faber, 2025).
The Dark Mountain books (2010– ). A hardback anthology of writing and art following the Uncivilisation manifesto. → dark-mountain.net
Criticism
Ireland
Andrew J. Auge and Eugene O’Brien (eds.), Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Climate Crisis (Routledge, 2021/22). A collection of scholarly essays on Irish poetry and climate, including chapters on Irish-language poets. → routledge.com
Christine Cusick (ed.), Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts (Cork University Press, 2010). Eleven essays; described by its publisher as the first collection of Irish ecocriticism.
Eóin Flannery, Ireland and Ecocriticism: Literature, History and Environmental Justice (Routledge, 2016). → routledge.com
Donna L. Potts, Contemporary Irish Writing and Environmentalism: The Wearing of the Deep Green (Palgrave, 2018). → springer.com
Derek Gladwin, Contentious Terrains: Boglands, Ireland, Postcolonial Gothic (2016).
Estudios Irlandeses, special issue on eco-fictions and the animal trope in Irish studies (2020). Free PDF. → estudiosirlandeses.org
General
- Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (eds.), The Ecocriticism Reader (1996)
- Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination (1995)
- Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology (1991); The Song of the Earth (2000)
- Terry Gifford, Green Voices (1995)
- J. Scott Bryson (ed.), Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (2002) — uofupress.com
- Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism — routledge.com
- Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature (2007); Hyperobjects (2013)
- Timothy Clark, The Value of Ecocriticism (2019) — cambridge.org
- Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008)
- Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011)
- Don McKay, Vis-à-Vis: Field Notes on Poetry and Wild Lands (2001)
- Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement (2016)
- Harriet Tarlo, ‘Radical Landscapes’, Jacket 32 (2007) — free
Background
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962) · Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949) · Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993) · Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (1989) · Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (2010) · Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures (2010) · Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) · Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (2016) · Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013).
Irish nature writing
The prose context: Tim Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage and Labyrinth, and the Connemara trilogy · Robert Lloyd Praeger, The Way That I Went (1937) · Seán Lysaght, Eagle Country (Little Toller, 2018) and Robert Lloyd Praeger: The Life of a Naturalist (Four Courts, 1998) · Michael Viney, the collected Another Life columns · Manchán Magan, Thirty-Two Words for Field (2020) · Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Thin Places (2021) · Catherine Cleary and Jane Clarke, The Hare’s Corner (New Island, 2025).
Early Irish poetry in translation
Kuno Meyer, Selections from Ancient Irish Poetry (1911) — out of copyright and widely available. Gerard Murphy, Early Irish Lyrics (Oxford, 1956) — a scholarly edition with facing Irish text.
The framing of this material as spontaneous nature observation owes a good deal to its early translators. Read the editions rather than summaries of them.
Last checked 2026-08-13