Overview

The color green is at the center of the spectrum. For earlier writers like Emily Dickinson or William Blake, the green world was a space of haunting, irreconcilable, opposites: life and death, human and vegetal, innocence and experience. In these essays, letters, repetitions, and experiments, poet and scholar Gillian Osborne adds a third, contemporary, term: the environment as both vital and ailing. This is nature writing outside of adventure or argument, ecological thinking as a space of shared homemaking: reading, writing, and living in vicinity with others.

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9781643620329

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Reviews

Gillian Osborne writes prose lithely and thinks with quickness and imagination. I think I learned something or saw something freshly on almost every page of her Green Green Green.-Robert Hass This innovative volume showcases a capacious range of critical approaches to the diverse forms, social practices, and political imaginaries of contemporary ecologically oriented poetics. Drawing poetry and environmental theory into compelling new configurations, Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field offers an essential field guide to ecopoetics in a calamitous era. -Margaret Ronda These incisive essays offer persuasive arguments for the relevance of diverse poetry to the actualities of ecological damage. They demonstrate how many contemporary poets, whether writing about green stuff, cities, selves, or language, take a critical stand alongside environmental scientists and campaigners, offering vital resources for our altering world. -Peter Middleton ushly literary and downright gorgeous, Green Green Green creates a confluence of theory, personal history, literary history, and the natural world. Reading takes place, Gillian Osborne shows us, by bringing us to places where her reading has brought her, always enacting a pivot from literature to nature and back again. Reinventing the way we think and write about literature and the environment, these essays do what the best essays do: they give us what Osborne calls an approximation of a wild within an increasingly tame space. -Cecily Parks

Osborne mines her personal life and literary research to think about change. These changes are her own: a young girl's growth from daughter and granddaughter to wife and mother. But they are also the changes of the planet as it warms, as seasons and weather shift, as fires consume California, and as the solace of orderly narrative is thrown into the crucible of climate disruption. -Boston Review Reaching the end of this collection is to reach a revised understanding about what reading and writing represent and accomplish-processes that at once become evergreen... Osborne turns green into practice, a way of life, challenging us to locate and live alongside the wildness that permeates our very roots. -The Adroit Journal I've called it a book about green, but really, of course, Green Green Green is a book about books-or rather, a book about reading, that magical and ordinary and mysterious and everyday thing that most of us, some of us, do so often we don't even think about the fact that it's happening, like breathing. -EcoTheo Green Green Green is a book where sentiment meets science, in the heartfelt progression of years gone by. There is something undeniably maudlin about family, seasons, and poetry, and Osborne brings this into focus with ruminations on grandparents, California droughts, ecological surveys and sonnets. She lingers on the gifts of the elderly, of books and honey -Vagabond City Gillian Osborne writes prose lithely and thinks with quickness and imagination. I think I learned something or saw something freshly on almost every page of her Green Green Green. -Robert Hass This innovative volume showcases a capacious range of critical approaches to the diverse forms, social practices, and political imaginaries of contemporary ecologically oriented poetics. Drawing poetry and environmental theory into compelling new configurations, Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field offers an essential field guide to ecopoetics in a calamitous era. -Margaret Ronda These incisive essays offer persuasive arguments for the relevance of diverse poetry to the actualities of ecological damage. They demonstrate how many contemporary poets, whether writing about green stuff, cities, selves, or language, take a critical stand alongside environmental scientists and campaigners, offering vital resources for our altering world. -Peter Middleton ushly literary and downright gorgeous, Green Green Green creates a confluence of theory, personal history, literary history, and the natural world. Reading takes place, Gillian Osborne shows us, by bringing us to places where her reading has brought her, always enacting a pivot from literature to nature and back again. Reinventing the way we think and write about literature and the environment, these essays do what the best essays do: they give us what Osborne calls an approximation of a wild within an increasingly tame space. -Cecily Parks

"""Osborne mines her personal life and literary research to think about change. These changes are her own: a young girl’s growth from daughter and granddaughter to wife and mother. But they are also the changes of the planet as it warms, as seasons and weather shift, as fires consume California, and as the solace of orderly narrative is thrown into the crucible of climate disruption.""—Boston Review ""Reaching the end of this collection is to reach a revised understanding about what reading and writing represent and accomplish—processes that at once become evergreen... Osborne turns green into practice, a way of life, challenging us to locate and live alongside the wildness that permeates our very roots.""—The Adroit Journal ""I’ve called it a book about green, but really, of course, Green Green Green is a book about books—or rather, a book about reading, that magical and ordinary and mysterious and everyday thing that most of us, some of us, do so often we don’t even think about the fact that it’s happening, like breathing.""—EcoTheo ""Green Green Green is a book where sentiment meets science, in the heartfelt progression of years gone by.  There is something undeniably maudlin about family, seasons, and poetry, and Osborne brings this into focus with ruminations on grandparents, California droughts, ecological surveys and sonnets. She lingers on the gifts of the elderly, of books and honey""—Vagabond City ""Gillian Osborne writes prose lithely and thinks with quickness and imagination. I think I learned something or saw something freshly on almost every page of her Green Green Green.""—Robert Hass ""This innovative volume showcases a capacious range of critical approaches to the diverse forms, social practices, and political imaginaries of contemporary ecologically oriented poetics. Drawing poetry and environmental theory into compelling new configurations, Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field offers an essential field guide to ecopoetics in a calamitous era.""—Margaret Ronda ""These incisive essays offer persuasive arguments for the relevance of diverse poetry to the actualities of ecological damage. They demonstrate how many contemporary poets, whether writing about green stuff, cities, selves, or language, take a critical stand alongside environmental scientists and campaigners, offering vital resources for our altering world.""—Peter Middleton ""ushly literary and downright gorgeous, Green Green Green creates a confluence of theory, personal history, literary history, and the natural world. “Reading takes place,” Gillian Osborne shows us, by bringing us to places where her reading has brought her, always enacting a “pivot from literature to nature and back again.” Reinventing the way we think and write about literature and the environment, these essays do what the best essays do: they give us what Osborne calls “an approximation of a wild within an increasingly tame space.""—Cecily Parks"

I've called it a book about green, but really, of course, Green Green Green is a book about books-or rather, a book about reading, that magical and ordinary and mysterious and everyday thing that most of us, some of us, do so often we don't even think about the fact that it's happening, like breathing. -EcoTheo Green Green Green is a book where sentiment meets science, in the heartfelt progression of years gone by. There is something undeniably maudlin about family, seasons, and poetry, and Osborne brings this into focus with ruminations on grandparents, California droughts, ecological surveys and sonnets. She lingers on the gifts of the elderly, of books and honey -Vagabond City Green Green Green goes from global and historical ideas to 'habitats, horticulture and histories' to the most personal. This undoubtedly applies to most collections of essays, but Gillian Osborne goes a long way: in one of the essays, the depiction of an exchange of letters between her and essayist Juliana Chow interweaves letters that Emily Dickinson wrote to her friend Abiah Root, and then also included the correspondence between Hawthorne and Melville. Emily Dickinson, who compiled her famous herbarium in 1840, is one of the starting points that Gillian Osborne returns to time and again, rereading and contextualizing her and her time, taking her gaze to the present. -Terras Mag Gillian Osborne writes prose lithely and thinks with quickness and imagination. I think I learned something or saw something freshly on almost every page of her Green Green Green. -Robert Hass This innovative volume showcases a capacious range of critical approaches to the diverse forms, social practices, and political imaginaries of contemporary ecologically oriented poetics. Drawing poetry and environmental theory into compelling new configurations, Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field offers an essential field guide to ecopoetics in a calamitous era. -Margaret Ronda These incisive essays offer persuasive arguments for the relevance of diverse poetry to the actualities of ecological damage. They demonstrate how many contemporary poets, whether writing about green stuff, cities, selves, or language, take a critical stand alongside environmental scientists and campaigners, offering vital resources for our altering world. -Peter Middleton ushly literary and downright gorgeous, Green Green Green creates a confluence of theory, personal history, literary history, and the natural world. Reading takes place, Gillian Osborne shows us, by bringing us to places where her reading has brought her, always enacting a pivot from literature to nature and back again. Reinventing the way we think and write about literature and the environment, these essays do what the best essays do: they give us what Osborne calls an approximation of a wild within an increasingly tame space. -Cecily Parks

Gillian Osborne writes prose lithely and thinks with quickness and imagination. I think I learned something or saw something freshly on almost every page of her Green Green Green.-Robert Hass This innovative volume showcases a capacious range of critical approaches to the diverse forms, social practices, and political imaginaries of contemporary ecologically oriented poetics. Drawing poetry and environmental theory into compelling new configurations, Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field offers an essential field guide to ecopoetics in a calamitous era. -Margaret Ronda These incisive essays offer persuasive arguments for the relevance of diverse poetry to the actualities of ecological damage. They demonstrate how many contemporary poets, whether writing about green stuff, cities, selves, or language, take a critical stand alongside environmental scientists and campaigners, offering vital resources for our altering world. -Peter Middleton ushly literary and downright gorgeous, Green Green Green creates a confluence of theory, personal history, literary history, and the natural world. Reading takes place, Gillian Osborne shows us, by bringing us to places where her reading has brought her, always enacting a pivot from literature to nature and back again. Reinventing the way we think and write about literature and the environment, these essays do what the best essays do: they give us what Osborne calls an approximation of a wild within an increasingly tame space. -Cecily Parks

Author Information

Gillian Osborne is a writer, educator, and aspirational gardener living in California. She is the co-editor of a collection of critical essays on modern and contemporary ecopoetics, and teaches for the Harvard Extension School and the Bard College Language & Thinking Program.

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