Reviewing an anthology is, by its nature, bound to be rather different from reviewing an individual collection. While it is necessary, when considering the work of one poet, to consider the coherence and shape of the book, the place of the poet within the canon, the truth and integrity of the subject matter and the development of the poet since earlier work, the major consideration is, naturally, the overall quality of the poetry.

The requirements for a review of an anthology are subtly different. For a start, work by very different poets is likely to vary in quality; and some poems are bound to fit more neatly into the chosen theme than others. It even seems a little invidious to single out a few poems for comment, as that necessitates omitting to mention scores of others that are probably just as worthy. This particular anthology contains poems by a number of well-known poets, alongside others by relative new-comers, and that is to be applauded; but it might possibly make the ride through the collection a little bumpier than might be expected.

So what criteria should one use in reviewing an anthology?

One question that is worth asking, particularly, perhaps, in this case, is: does the poetry selection justify the title of the book? 100 Poems to Save the Earth is nothing if not ambitious. There are no ifs or buts, no gentle suggestion that the collection might have just a tiny part to play in saving the planet, no desire to support those acting on our behalf in their efforts to address climate change. Every reader knows, of course, that the collection, inspiring as it may be, cannot do very much even to slightly alleviate the dire straits we are in. However, perhaps poetic licence will allow the title to stand, reminding us of the need to find new and dramatic ways to come together to try to save the earth – or, rather, to save the human race: the earth will probably get along fine if it loses us, but the future of humanity is in severe danger.

In order to satisfy the title, one would expect to find poems of warning, celebration and fear; and such poems do occur in the anthology. Owen Sheer’s “Liable to Floods”, which relates a flood bearing away an army camp, is clearly a metaphor for much more than that, and is a vivid warning of what much of planet Earth is likely to face now and in the future.

Given the precarious state we find ourselves in, it is not surprising that there is, in this collection, more warning than celebration. But there are positive poems too, including Mimi Khalvati’s delightful sonnet, “Eggs”. After reading this poem, one understands more of what an egg truly is. And this simplicity of responding in celebration can be found in other poems, such as “September” by Jennifer Hunt:

Now, with my colander,
by the open kitchen door,
the sun makes a square on the red lino.
Outside, white hens peck at shreds of light.

In order to celebrate the Earth, one must also learn to see clearly; and Kei Miller, in “To know green from green”, drives a clean scalpel between some of the various shades that we sometimes forget to differentiate as we label them all green:

You must know emerald different from jade; know greens that travel
towards grey – laurel, artichoke, sage. Forest is different from jungle
is different from tree which is itself a shade of green.

Fear is slightly different from warning. It is what follows on when we fully realise the gravity of the warnings we have received. Ros Cogan, in “Ragnarök”, moves us on from warning to fear:

A one-eyed man will pull on his broad-brimmed hat
and stalk away. Please don't expect a warning.
This is a whimper not a bang, but it's
a whimper that
will level hills and drown the suffering world.

However, at the end of the day, what one wants from a book entitled 100 Poems to Save the Earth is hope. And we are not denied that in this collection. To name but two examples, the well-known “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry, with its prescription for what we should do if we wake in the night in terror of what is to come, for ourselves and our children:

I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The poems of true hope are, unsurprisingly, in rather short supply. But then, the fact that there are 100 poems here wanting to save the earth is, in itself, a glimmer of hope. And, of course, this anthology is in no way comprehensive. Thousands of poets all over the world are loving the earth and creating poetry to celebrate and, if possible, sustain it. Sometimes this is through dramatic poems warning us of what humanity is doing to the earth, and sometimes in quieter and more modest ways, as Grahame Davies points out in “Prayer”: ‘In unremembered quiet words / that keep a soul on the path‘.

There are, of course, many more poems in this anthology that are worthy of mention and that I’d like to quote in full. These include “When you touch me I am a wind turbine” by Liz Berry and “Seabird’s Blessing” by Alice Oswald.

Leaving the individual poems aside, it is possible to look at how well the book works as an anthology. Factors here include selection, layout, editing and overall shape. The editors have attempted to be inclusive in their selection, though any choice of what to include is bound to have limitations and there will always be poems and/or poets that others would have chosen. The gentle emergence of themes through the book, such as fish, birds, bees and honey, is satisfying; and the general layout is good...

There are many mantras in Seren’s new anthology of ecologically concerned poems, and it is a shame that radical change and recovery cannot be effected by the simple reinforcement of creative solutions through repetition. For here, in concise and refined form, we might find a teleology of celebration expressed in a form of biblical chant (‘A New Song’, Michael Symmons Roberts), or hope borne out of the absolute ordinary in Grahame Davies’ understated ‘Prayer’ – a hymn to the silent workings of invisible hands that move us ‘slowly closer to the light’.

Davies’ sense of purpose is embattled in the wider sphere of catastrophic climate change. That his hope is conditional on an invocation is one measure of how little we are prepared to invest in the kinds of constructive thinking that might offer some breathing space. But his faith in the integrity of ‘honesty and truth’, and in the achievement of quiet miracles, reminds, tangentially, of the little grey, toothless men in suits who transformed the Britain of 1945 into a society of serviceable decency.

Alice Oswald’s profoundly pained ‘Seabird’s Blessing’ clears the field of anthropocentric hubris: the studied murmurings of birds, in a landscape frighteningly denuded of locators, are wrought as liturgical pleas whose meaning is both desperate, and desperately ironic:

‘Pray for us this weird
bare place – we are screaming
O sky count us not as nothing
O sea count us not as nothing’

But anything is possible, even in the most aridly unprepossessing of circumstances, as Erin Robinsong’s orison to the mutating of the leopard’s spots devoutly desires. Her witty perambulation through the hinterland of unlikelihood reverses Dante’s Contrapasso by wishing enlightenment on those – the oligarchs and the politicians – who move and shake, and liberation on the moved and the shaken:

‘May our actions be deft as the inhale after a dream of suffocation.’ (‘Late Prayer’)

One of the many wonderful things about Zoë Brigley and Kristian Evans’ curation of 100 Poems to Save the Earth is the angle of approach, which is both unconventional and generous: half expecting a division into sections, I was pleasantly surprised to discover general themes arising in vague, suggestive tranches. For there is a concealed sense of order here, as though underwriting the needfulness of unity and cooperation in the interests of lasting resolution. And to this degree, at least, the collection as a whole may act to ‘legislate’ for truth when the received and commonplace aspect is of a tent marked ‘Poetry’ tucked away in one corner of the literary field.

The uniformly high quality of the work here ensures that poetry is anything but marginal to the expedient of survival. From ‘Prayer’ to ‘Flood’, to the natural world going about its business, to the terrible counterpoint of ‘Extinction’, the turn of mind, if not the commitment, is frequently religiose in character. And it is good to see a revivification of a canonical poetics hither and thither interspersed amongst a phenomenally able representation of current writers. Not least Wendell Berry, whose seminal ‘The Peace of Wild Things’ gets a deserved reprise here, and looks increasingly relevant in the present crisis, as great poems should.

Good, too, to see a loose arrangement of more formal poems at the heart of this compelling anthology, whose presence gives body and structure to what amounts to an existential plea. Medbh McGuckian’s richly metaphorical mapping of the body politic in ‘The Colony Room’ is a tactile conflation of human, natural and cultural nuances where points of conjunction are ‘watered’ like thirsty roots by soft rhythms, rhymes and half-rhymes. And John Kinsella, whose metre and lineation in ‘Penillion of Cormorants in Polluted Rivers’ is as thin and withered as a bird’s leg, and as drained of life as a diesel-clogged waterway. Traditionally sung at Eisteddfod, a Penillion, or series of improvised verses performed to the accompaniment of a harp, is rendered deliberately stagnant, in a mire of alliterative entropy:

‘Those snake-necked birds
Perch on absurd
Protrusions, test
Pillar and post’.

It takes an insightful leap of the imagination to re-interpret the bewildered condition of an animal species imperilled by manmade climatic phenomena, and when artfully construed, the process transfigures perception by the subtle re-calibration of our empathic senses. A neat corollary to Alice Oswald’s poem, Leo Boix’s livid images of an Icarean goldfinch flying towards an all-consuming fire, its voice and vibrancy consumed in the flames, harbour a symbolism every bit as visceral as Louis MacNeice’s in ‘Brother Fire’, yet as profoundly current as news images of koalas incinerated in Australian bush fires. If Boix, like MacNeice, can trace purgatorial beauty in conflagration, a quite other message is implied in ‘the giant ball’ that ‘glows a bright red, maroon, resplendent, / blowing shards, magenta’. (‘Goldfinch Comes to Tell Us There’s a Fire at the End of Our Garden, He’).

This book is eloquent precisely because it is so thematically and tonally diverse: that the Doomsday Clock’s grim setting – presently 100 seconds to midnight - is a cool scientific calculation of the world’s potential for catastrophe taken in the depressing round and covering every conceivable denouement, underwrites poetry’s moral obligation to consider the spectres of war, famine and migration as parallel, indivisibly interwoven problems. Abeer Ameer’s haunting diptych, ‘the Storyteller’, explores a region beyond pain where the meaning of the war-torn present is extruded through fable for the children of a Najaf classroom. The crushing verisimilitude of Art and Life melt into the empty space where a child no longer thrives, and story and reality enjoin a perverse unity in one hopeless epithet – ‘When you cling to a thing you love it dies’. The dark intrusion of suggestion into innocent lives is echoed in Fiona Benson’s harrowing prose-poem, ‘Eurofighter Typhoon’ where the sudden shock of a jet’s ‘metallic, grinding scream’ poleaxes a child in terror, and yields for the narrator/mother, the terrible realisation of existence for so many besieged others: ‘It’s never all right now’, she despairs, ‘Christ have mercy’.

Desperate prayer will not mollify the gods of war; Mir Mahfuz Ali’s harrowing, close-range depiction of ‘Mig-21 Raids at Shegontola’ is rendered with the open-eyed authenticity of the witness, and with acute attention to the fine detail of a missile attack. Reaping the wild wind in a vortex of metaphor, the poet’s deft touch - ‘The whirling smoke packed / with bricks and cement, / chicken feathers and nigella seeds’ – makes of the typhoon of destruction a savage irony, as the boy caught in the maelstrom ‘finds himself dressed / like an apprentice baker’.

The shaping of the world into a sterile mess, by missile, radiation or overheating, focuses the poetic mind into apoplexies of dark reflection. Starkly visual rejoinders disturb the root as effectively as an exposed nerve: close observation of the breakdown of the natural order acts as a warning by default so that some of the most striking poems, here, acquire gravitas on the strength of prognostic suggestion. Sina Queyras’ brilliant, dystopian ‘Endless Inter-States: 1’ subverts perception in a shady underworld supervised by watchmen with machine guns, where the collective grip on old realities is loosening and ‘seasons / Vaguely reminiscent of seasons’ just about obtain. And Tamar Yoseloff’s couplets in ‘Knotweed’ embody a relentlessly destructive power whose subject is an efficient metaphor for the silent undermining of humanity’s earthly leasehold. The stubbornness of the root that brings down houses carries no calling card save for an energy as inexorable as Thomas’ ‘green fuse’: ‘Fleeceflower, the fleet hour of inflorescence / bursts, you drape your skirts // over the earth’.

Maybe there is hope in the invigorating authority of words. If we were to identify one poem in this beautiful, brilliant, desperately sad collection, that encapsulates the most pressing concerns of an age, it might be Gillian Clarke’s exploration of the blending of myth and reality, of time and tide, and of a delicate landscape in uncontrolled overdrive. ‘Cantre’r Gwaelod’ is an elegy for a land in turmoil, conceived in achingly refulgent images embellished in the credulous and innocent glow of the ancient past, yet tarnished by the expedients of a neglectful present. Clarke’s final sestet is a clear-eyed and concise denunciation of an indifferent age:

‘for Earth’s intricate engineering, unpicked
like the flesh, sinews, bones of the mother duck
crushed on the motorway, her young
bewildered in a blizzard of feathers;
the balance of things undone by money,
the indifferent hunger of the sea’.