International poets

Poets whose books are substantially concerned with ecology, the non-human world or environmental change.

Earlier

John Clare (1793–1864) — Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820) · The Shepherd’s Calendar (1827). A farm labourer who recorded the enclosure of his Northamptonshire parish, and the birds and plants it removed. Public domain. Poetry Foundation

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) — Tamar and Other Poems (1924) · Selected Poems. The California coast. He used the term inhumanism for a shift of emphasis away from human concerns. Poetry Foundation

Lorine Niedecker (1903–1970) — Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy (2002); Lake Superior, built from a research notebook of rock, water and glacial history. Poetry Foundation

A. R. Ammons (1926–2001) — Corsons Inlet (1965) · Garbage (1993); winner of the National Book Award. A book-length poem set at a landfill. Poetry Foundation

W. S. Merwin (1927–2019) — The Lice (1967) · The Rain in the Trees (1988) · The Shadow of Sirius (2008). Extinction and deforestation. He spent decades restoring a ruined pineapple plantation on Maui, now the Merwin Conservancy. Poetry Foundation · Merwin Conservancy

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) — River (1983) · Moortown Diary (Faber, 1989). Rivers, farming and animals; he campaigned on river pollution in Devon. See Yvonne Reddick, Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet (Palgrave, 2017). Poetry Foundation

Judith Wright (1915–2000) — The Moving Image (1946) · Collected Poems. Australian landscape. She co-founded the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland in 1962 and campaigned on the Great Barrier Reef and Aboriginal land rights. National Portrait Gallery of Australia

Les Murray (1938–2019) — Translations from the Natural World (1992). A sequence written in the voices of animals, plants and other non-human subjects. Poetry Foundation

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) — American Primitive (1983); a Pulitzer winner · Devotions (2017). Ponds, woods and birds. Poetry Foundation

Contemporary

Gary Snyder — Riprap (1959), issued with Cold Mountain Poems from 1965 · Turtle Island (1974); a Pulitzer winner · Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996). Wilderness, work and watershed; Turtle Island sets out a bioregional politics alongside the poems. Poetry Foundation

Wendell Berry — The Unsettling of America (1977) · This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems (2013). Farming, land use and rural community. Poetry Foundation

Don McKay — Vis-à-Vis: Field Notes on Poetry and Wild Lands (2001) · Strike/Slip (2006); a Griffin Prize winner. Birds and geology; Vis-à-Vis sets out what he calls poetic attention. Brick Books

Alice Oswald — Dart (2002); a T. S. Eliot Prize winner · Woods etc. (2005) · Falling Awake (2016). Dart is built from years of recorded conversations with people who live and work along a Devon river, including a sewage worker. Faber

Kathleen Jamie — The Tree House (2004) · The Overhaul (2012); essays: Findings (2005) · Sightlines (2012) · Surfacing (2019). Birds, whales, islands and archaeology. Scottish Poetry Library

Jorie Graham — Sea Change (2008) · Fast (2017) · Runaway (2020) · [To 2040] (2023). A late body of work given over to climate and extinction. Carcanet

Brenda Hillman — Cascadia (2001) · Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005) · Practical Water (2009) · Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), a Griffin Prize winner. Those four make a sequence on the classical elements. Poetry Foundation

Juliana Spahr — This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005) · That Winter the Wolf Came (2015). Breath, air and the porousness of bodies. Poetry Foundation

Forrest Gander — Be With (2018); a Pulitzer winner · Twice Alive (2021) · Mojave Ghost (2024). Lichen, symbiosis and geology; trained in geology as well as literature. Poetry Foundation

Camille T. Dungy — Trophic Cascade (2017); prose: Soil (2023). Editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2009). Academy of American Poets

Craig Santos Perez — the from unincorporated territory series, [hacha] (2008) to [åmot] (2023), which won the National Book Award; Habitat Threshold (2020). Pacific ecologies, reef loss and sea-level rise. Chamoru, from Guåhan. Poetry Foundation

Linda Hogan — The Book of Medicines (1993) · Dwellings (1995) · Dark. Sweet. (2014). Animals, water and land. Chickasaw. Poetry Foundation

Joy Harjo — She Had Some Horses (1983) · A Map to the Next World (2000) · An American Sunrise (2019). Land, memory and displacement. Muscogee (Creek) Nation; 23rd US Poet Laureate. Academy of American Poets

Natalie Diaz — Postcolonial Love Poem (2020); a Pulitzer winner. The Colorado River and water rights. Mojave. Poetry Foundation

Tommy Pico — Nature Poem (Tin House, 2017) · IRL (2016) · Junk (2018) · Feed (2019). Kumeyaay. Poetry Foundation

Evelyn Araluen — Dropbear (University of Queensland Press, 2021); a Stella Prize winner. Australian landscape writing and its colonial inheritance. Descended from the Bundjalung Nation. UQP

Jason Allen-Paisant — Thinking with Trees (Carcanet, 2021); an OCM Bocas Prize winner. Trees, walking, and access to green space. jasonallenpaisant.com

John Kinsella — the wheatbelt sequences and Divine Comedy. Western Australian agriculture, land clearing and salinity. Poetry Foundation

Pascale Petit — Fauverie (Seren, 2014) · Mama Amazonica (Bloodaxe, 2017); an RSL Ondaatje Prize winner · Tiger Girl (2020). Amazon rainforest and endangered species. Bloodaxe

Harriet Tarlo — editor of The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011); her essay ‘Radical Landscapes’, Jacket 32 (2007), is free to read. Shearsman

Robin Wall Kimmerer — prose, not poetry: Gathering Moss (2003) · Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) · The Serviceberry (2024). A botanist; Citizen Potawatomi. Milkweed

Also named in the anthologies and criticism

Denise Levertov · Muriel Rukeyser · Evelyn Reilly · Marcella Durand · Jonathan Skinner · Arthur Sze · Ross Gay · Ed Roberson · Layli Long Soldier · Ann Fisher-Wirth · Laura-Gray Street · Melissa Tuckey · Elizabeth Bradfield · Aimee Nezhukumatathil · Jan Zwicky · Robert Bringhurst · Rita Wong · Adam Dickinson · John Burnside · Jen Hadfield · Sean Borodale · Isabel Galleymore · Karen McCarthy Woolf · Mona Arshi · Zoë Skoulding · Frances Presley · Peter Larkin · Thomas A. Clark · Polly Atkin · Inger Christensen · Hone Tuwhare · Zheng Xiaoqiong

Last checked 2026-08-13