Author Description

Rivers are an inexhaustible source of metaphors and meanings, linking us with numberless generations who have paused to wonder at the paradox of constancy and flow. Poetry has a special capacity to convey the elusive qualities of running water, its magical transformations, its correspondences with life's meanderings, and the particular qualities of actual streams and rivers. While in recent years some rivers have been cleansed and restored, so that they are healthier now than at any time since the industrial revolution, other rivers are under assault from the impacts of modern society--chemical pollution, the lowering of water tables, erosion of banks and stream beds, and flooding due to global climate change, as well as destruction of plant and animal habitat. In this book, more than 180 poems create a chorus of older voices (Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, Dickinson) and new, from both sides of the Atlantic, including Margaret Atwood, Seamus Heaney, A. R. Ammons, Adrienne Rich, Randall Jarrell, William Carlos Williams, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Andrew Motion and Elizabeth Bishop.