This Earth Has Been Too Generous by Susan Marsh

In this collection, and in so much of her verse and prose, Susan Marsh writes with precision and passion for wild places and their inhabitants. Her poems read as lyrical calls to action to notice, to love, and to protect wildness in the world and in ourselves. These poems create habitats where the reader’s imagination can thrive in the restorative power of nature and bear witness to its loss. Reading This Earth Has Been Too Generous reminds us that as we allow wildness in the world to fade, we are ourselves diminished. We need collections like this one.

–Matt Daly, author of Between Here and Home (Unsolicited Press, 2019)

Susan Marsh’s inaugural poetry collection is filled with prayers and elegies for what our Anthropocene era has wrought to one blue planet. These poems invoke the land Marsh has walked and revered for decades. Her scientist’s eye and ear offers readers meditations on places some will never wander, places with their “Bright, laundry-day air / Water we can drink.” Marsh’s writing always paints a scene, whether this “last blue folding chair,” that “blue-green power of the wind,” or those “Blood-red lines of sunrise (that) broaden to a saffron streak.” She wonders, like many of us, if it’s too late to “Abide instead this rough and unkempt row,” this planet that “has been too generous” for us to foster, to leave Earth as human beings found it.

–Connie Wieneke, poet and author