Poetry for Reading Under A Tree

10 minute read

Let’s enjoy some poetry while reading under a tree this sunny season! ☀️

Imagine yourself under the shade of a grand oak, a gentle breeze rustling through the leaves, and the warm sun casting dappled patterns on the ground. This is the perfect setting for a poetry lover seeking a moment of tranquility and inspiration. Whether you’re looking to reconnect with nature, find solace in reflective verses, or simply enjoy the beauty of well-crafted words, poetry offers a unique escape. As you relax in this serene outdoor haven reading under a tree, let the rhythm and imagery of carefully chosen poems transport you, offering a refreshing perspective and a sense of peace.

 

Grab a blanket and something refreshing to sip on for our outdoor poetry recommendations.

 

You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

by Ada Limón

isbn: 9781571315687,template: list, title: You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by fifty of our most celebrated contemporary writers.
In recent years, our poetic landscape has evolved in profound and exciting ways. So has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, this book challenges what we think we know about “nature poetry,” illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes–both literal and literary–are changing. You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation’s most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more. Each poem engages with its author’s local landscape–be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop–offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States.

Flickering

by Pattiann Rogers – John A Rogers

isbn: 9780143137665,template: list, title: Flickering

“[Rogers’] poems bring an openness of spirit and an almost scientific curiosity to the world at her feet, cataloging unexpected connections everywhere she looks.” —New York Times Book Review

A new collection from a poet whose “celebrations of science and approachable yet profound spiritual connection to the Earth delight, entertain, and elevate” (The Poetry Foundation)

Denise Levertov has called the poet Pattiann Rogers “a visionary of reality, perceiving the material world with such intensity of response that impulse, intention, meaning, interconnections beyond the skin of appearance are revealed.” The consistent theme In Flickering, her new collection, is the very breadth and prodigiousness of the universe itself. These wise poems, many inspired by various kinds of flickering actions in plants, animals, and natural processes, move nimbly between inner and outer worlds as Rogers addresses themes ranging from beauty, resilience and creation to the tensions and relationships between humans and wildness.

Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise

by Olivia Laing

isbn: 9780393882001,template: list, title: Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there’s still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.

But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.

The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.

Lord of the Butterflies

by Andrea Gibson

isbn: 9781943735426,template: list, title: Lord of the Butterflies

Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) Gold Medal Winner
Midwest Book Awards – Poetry Winner
Eric Hoffer Book Awards – Poetry Winner
Goodreads Choice Awards – Best Poetry Book Finalist
Forewords Reviews INDIES Awards – Poetry Finalist
Andrea Gibson’s latest collection is a masterful showcase from the poet whose writing and performances have captured the hearts of millions. With artful and nuanced looks at gender, romance, loss, and family, Lord of the Butterflies is a new peak in Gibson’s career. Each emotion here is deft and delicate, resting inside of imagery heavy enough to sink the heart, while giving the body wings to soar.

Nature Sings by Marlene Tidwell

Voted as one of the official state poems of Tennessee, My Beloved Tennessee, was penned by Marlene Tidwell. Her recent book, Nature Sings, is a beautiful collection of poems, photography and vignettes inspired by nature and its seasons. Each poem leads the reader to a place of calm and serenity as they gaze upon the canvas of printed words and become enthralled by the beauty and bliss of nature.

In her poem, Midnight’s Mystery, nature sings through the night as the moon and lake dance rocking the reader into a tranquil peace. The soothing symphony will play on your heart as you discover the secrets of nature in each verse. The natural world comes alive as scenes are painted through the printed word in each poem of this pastoral collection.

The green world of grass, trees and plants mingle together to sing the lyrics in each line in Nature Sings. Clouds, fancy and free ride through a summer’s night in Gliders in the Sky and will whisk you away to the valley of serenity where the stress and worries of the day will vanish.

Principle of Rapid Peering

by Sylvia Legris

isbn: 9780811237642,template: list, title: Principle of Rapid Peering

Self-seeding wind

is a wind of ever-replenishing breath.

The title of Sylvia Legris’ melopoeic collection The Principle of Rapid Peering comes from a phrase the nineteenth-century ornithologist and field biologist Joseph Grinnell used to describe the feeding behavior of certain birds. Rather than waiting passively for food to approach them, these birds live in a continuous mode of “rapid peering.” Legris explores this rich theme of active observation through a spray of poems that together form a kind of almanac or naturalist’s notebook in verse.

Here is “where nature converges with words,” as the poet walks through prairie habitats near her home in Saskatchewan, through lawless chronologies and mellifluous strophes of strobili and solstice. Moths appear frequently, as do birds and plants and larvae, all meticulously observed and documented with an oblique sense of the pandemic marking the seasons. Elements of weather, ornithology, entomology, and anatomy feed her condensed, inflective lines, making the heart bloom and the intellect dance.

Dot

by Ron Padgett

isbn: 9781566896559,template: list, title: Dot

In this new poetry collection, Pulitzer Prize finalist Ron Padgett illuminates the wonders inside things that don’t even exist–and then they do.

In Dot, Ron Padgett returns with more of the playfully profound work that has endeared him to generations of readers. Guided by curiosity and built on wit, generosity of spirit, and lucid observation, Dot shows how any experience, no matter how mundane, can lead to a poem that flares like gentle fireworks in the night sky of the reader’s mind.

 

 

 

 

 

Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves

by J Drew Lanham

isbn: 9798885740302,template: list, title: Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves

From J. Drew Lanham, MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient and author of Sparrow Envy: A Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, comes a sensuous new collection in his signature mix of poetry and prose.

 

In gorgeous and timely pieces, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves is a lush journey into wildness and Black being. Lanham notices nature through seasonal shifts, societal unrest, and deeply personal reflection and traces a path from bitter history to the present predicament. Drawing canny connections between the precarity of nature and the long arm of racism, the collection offers reconciliation and eco-reparation as hopeful destinations from our current climate of division. In Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves, Lanham mines the deep connection to ancestors through the living world and tunes his unique voice toward embracing the radical act of joy.

Daydream: Poetry Book

by Ariel West

isbn: 9781034318965,template: list, title: Daydream: Poetry Book

My first book as an amateur poet holds pages full of passion and heartfelt emotion that many can relate to. A hopeless romantics perfect choice. connect with the author on instagram! @arielwestjr Also check out ‘the need of light and you’ a poetry collection on the journey of healing and love within modern dating.
When wanting to find the perfect collection of poems for reading under a tree, who doesn’t at some point let their mind stray into a delightful daydream?

Wonderful

by Harry Baker – Joel Baker

isbn: 9781913958497,template: list, title: Wonderful

World Poetry Slam Champion Harry Baker’s latest collection is his most ambitious yet.

Following on from the success of Unashamed (Burning Eye, 2022), Harry Baker combines the insight of a mathematician and the vulnerability of the poet to find wonder in the little things that make life so precious. From a poem about wellies becoming an exploration of masculinity, a poem planning his own funeral inspiring thousands around the world to do the same, or a poem about his favourite German wheat-beer literally just being a poem about his favourite German wheat-beer, The combination of grief and joy in recent poems has led to Harry being described as the Barbenheimer of the poetry world (by himself, but he is hoping it catches on).

The Asking: New and Selected Poems

by Jane Hirshfield

isbn: 9780593535950,template: list, title: Asking: New and Selected Poems

The long-awaited new and selected collection by the author of “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), assaying the ranges of our shared and borrowed lives.

In an era of algorithm, assertion, silo, and induced distraction, Jane Hirshfield’s poems bring a much-needed awakening response, actively countering narrowness. The Asking takes its title from the close of one of its thirty-one new poems: “don’t despair of this falling world, not yet / didn’t it give you the asking.” Interrogating language and life, pondering beauty amid bewilderment and transcendence amid transience, Hirshfield offers a signature investigation of the conditions, contradictions, uncertainties, and astonishments that shape our existence.

A leading advocate for the biosphere and the alliance of science and imagination, she brings to both inner and outer quandaries an abiding compass: the choice to embrace what is, to face with courage, curiosity, and a sense of kinship whatever comes.

In poems that consider the smallest ant and the vastness of time, hunger and bounty, physics, war, and love in myriad forms, this collection–drawing from nine previous books and five decades of writing–brings the insights and slant-lights that come to us only through poetry’s arc, delve, and tact; through a vision both close and sweeping; through music-inflected thought and recombinant leap.

Portrait of a Young Girl Falling

by Katrina Moinet

Portrait of a Young Girl Falling is unapologetic in its feminist exploration of desire, consent, identity, and gendered experience. Katrina Moinet’s poems tug at violences and tensions present in language, the way it constructs, shapes, limits, or opens up our conception of these things.

Stunning and experimental, this compact debut collection is brimming with fresh strategies of association, productive or interrogative ambiguities, multiplicities of meaning that make space for new ways of thinking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you are realizing these are not the books you’d want reading under a tree, that’s fine! We have so much more poetry, memoir, and self-care summer books for your vibe right here!

 

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