Field Days

An Anthology of Poetry

Meadows and fields exist at the boundary where human endeavors meet the natural world. The poems in this collection are drawn from across centuries of a literary tradition that uses the pastoral landscape as setting for exploring complex and timeless questions about that encounter between human and non-human existence.

The poems were chosen as lyrical celebrations-or in some instances, eulogies-for fields, and for the old way of life that fields represent. Some of the poets evoke lullabies out of childhood memory; others beat archetypal time to the rhythm of work: plowing and sowing, haying and threshing. More recent poems document the increasingly uneasy coexistence of people and fields, witnessing the grim effects of development and careless use of once fertile hillsides and meadows.

This anthology brings together the work of more than ninety poets, ancient and modern, including:

• Wendell Berry
• William Blake
• Robert Graves
• Seamus Heaney
• John Keats
• Denise Levertov
• Sylvia Plath
• Christina Rossetti
• Walt Whitman

About the Author
Common Ground is a nonprofit organization that seeks to inspire people to remember the richness of everyday landscapes and to renew our emotional engagement with places as we learn to take better care of them. Visit the Common Ground website for more information (www.commonground.org.uk).