Wow. I came home from work and am delighted to see that the collected wisdom of the Sphere has come through.
Thanks to everyone who replied. I see that I will have to look more carefully at Mary Oliver’s work, or at least her early work. The poem linked to by Michael is better than the others I’ve seen by her, but even there the clichéd ending about letting what you love go free is disappointing. Wendell Berry sounds very intriguing, and I’ll have to look up the half dozen poets whose names are new to me.
I know the work of Heaney and Walcott and think of their voices as having been formed much earlier, even though both wrote well until near the end of their lives. I see that Walcott’s
White Egrets is well thought of.
What I’m hoping is that someone will point me to newer emerging poets who are writing (or have the potential to write) the
Tintern Abbey or
Cooper’s Hill of our age.
For context, I love the work of Amy Clampitt, and poems like
The Cormorant in its Element and
The Winter Bird are truly great. My favourite nature poem by hers is
A Hermit Thrush, with its view of nature as constantly wounded and patching itself and making do. The nature poem with the greatest influence on me, though, is
Corsons Inlet by A.R. Ammons, with its view of nature as ever-changing and defying categorization. It’s a view of nature as chaos theory and a poetics at the same time.
It bothered me that I couldn’t name any poems from the last 20 years that have affected me in that way, and that I was ignorant of what’s happening now. So thank-you for your suggestions, and I hope that the recommendations will keep coming.