Poems For Gardeners
By (Author) Germaine Greer
Little, Brown Book Group
Virago Press Ltd
14th January 2025
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Hardback
272
Width 132mm, Height 202mm, Spine 32mm
380g
Marianne Moore said that the poet's job was to depict 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them'. In truth, gardens are always imaginary because they are always the garden that you are aiming for rather than the garden you have, but the toads are real and immediate.' So says Germaine Greer in this wonderful anthology.
This collection of poems, culled from classical antiquity to the twenty-first century, includes perennial favourites such as Marvell's 'The Garden' and Frost's 'After Apple-picking' and Roethke's famous greenhouse lyrics, as well as surprises like Tennyson's anti-botanical 'Amphion' and Fleur Adcock's 'Emblem' on the mating of slugs, not to mention small masterpieces like Philip Larkin's 'Cut Grass' and Phoebe Hesketh's 'Death of a Gardener'. Poems for Gardeners can be read along with the seed catalogues in the dead of winter, or in the gaps between tasks on a busy day in spring, or between snoozes in the hammock in the deep midsummer.Dr Germaine Greer first came to international attention thirty years ago with the publication of The Female Eunoch. She is Professor of English at Warwick University and a respected columnist and cultural commentator. She lives in Essex.