Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War

Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War

Edited by Anne Coray, J.C. Todd, and Teresa Mei Chuc

Forewords by Scott McVay and Rick Steiner

Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War offers a groundbreaking and vital perspective on war’s destruction of the natural world—the creatures, plants, soil, water, and atmosphere of Earth. In poems and contextual comments, 61 contemporary poets focus on military damages to the ecosystems on six continents and the moon. Framed by a cogent introduction and a pair of forewords, one on the poetry and the other on global consequences, the poems are accompanied by a tally of ecological costs and a set of thought-provoking discussion and writing prompts for teens and adults. This compelling anthology alerts readers to environmental degradation of our planet while affirming nature’s resilience and regeneration.

Contributors: Ninety poems, each paired with an Author’s Note, by U.S. and international poets, including John Balaban, Gillian Clarke, Camille T. Dungy, Ferida Duraković, W.D. Ehrhart, William Heyen, Cynthia Hogue, Denise Low, Craig Santos Perez, Vivian Faith Prescott, Eric Paul Shaffer, Jillian Sullivan, Brian Turner, Pamela Uschuk, and Mai Der Vang.

From Convergence:

Lament

For the green turtle with her pulsing burden,
in search of the breeding ground.
For her eggs laid in their nest of sickness.

For the cormorant in his funeral silk,
the veil of iridescence on the sand,
the shadow on the sea.

For the ocean’s lap with its mortal stain.
For Ahmed at the closed border.
For the soldier with his uniform of fire.

For the gunsmith and the armourer,
the boy fusilier who joined for the company,
the farmer’s sons, in it for the music.

For the hook-beaked turtles,
the dugong and the dolphin,
the whale struck dumb by the missile’s thunder.

For the tern, the gull and the restless wader,
the long migrations and the slow dying,
the veiled sun and the stink of anger.

For the burnt earth and the sun put out,
the scalded ocean and the blazing well.
For vengeance, and the ashes of language.

— Gillian Clarke

Praise for Convergence

"Bringing light to a dark place, these geographically and historically wide-reaching poems illuminate how war pulls, from under our feet, the earth on which we stand and pollutes even the air we breathe. Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War is unique in its scope and its focus on how war’s intolerable human cost is inseparable from the devastation of nature and its non-human animals—war against life itself. Though, like green shoots from a charred root, here, too, are poems of eloquent witness to nature’s humbling power of resilience and restoration."
— Eleanor Wilner, Chancellor, Academy of American Poets

"Convergence contains burst after burst of pure poetic anguish for animals, plants, and humans. This insightful, one-of-a-kind anthology seeks to capture the scale of our staggering inhumanity in war, where restraints are absent. Three gifted editors have chosen poems that bear witness to the environmental ravages of war in hopes of rousing our sensibilities about what we have done to our planet. Convergence may well transform readers’ perceptions, motivating them to become stewards and caregivers of the Earth."
— Scott McVay, cetologist, poet, explorer, founding Executive Director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

"What powerful poems coeditors Teresa Mei Chuc, Anne Coray, and J. C. Todd have gathered in the splendid new anthology Convergence—a collection that confronts us with the suffering and death inflicted on other-than-human beings by human actions. From ancient Rome to the wars of colonization, through the two World Wars, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Gulf War, and the destruction of Gaza, these poems bear eloquent witness to the fact, as Sean Mclain Brown writes in a note to his poem 'Migration,' 'There are no winners in war.' And as Gillian Clarke comments in her note to 'Lament,' 'War can’t be waged without grave damage to every aspect of life. . . . The ashes of language are the death of truth during war.' Reading this book, may we be changed by it."
— Ann Fisher-Wirth, Mississippi Poet Laureate, Coeditor, Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology

"Convergence tells an important story. It’s a story for the Earth and for all of humanity. It offers a vital perspective on war history that has rarely been considered, focusing on damage to ecosystems and the flora and fauna that animate them. Organized chronologically, these poems guide us through the deep history of war’s impact on the living world, each poem accompanied by a brief statement providing historical context. The inescapable irony is that writing about damage to the natural world is also writing about damage to the human world because the essential principle of ecology is that Earth and all its creatures, including us, are interconnected and interdependent."
— Anne McCrary Sullivan, naturalist, poet, author of Notes of A Marine Biologist’s Daughter