The Thunder Mutters

"This radical anthology is concerned with what Robert Lowell called 'this sweet volcanic cone', our human planet. The book is dedicated to the rake, an age-old implement which connects the earth to our hands, and the landscape with the sky. Alice Oswald has chosen poems which lie along the line of encounter between the personal and the natural world - from work poems at one end of the scale (songs for lowering anchors, or for cutting cotton) to metamorphic poems in which, at the other extreme, the human has crossed entirely over into non-human. In between, there are any number of portraits of…