Wild Reckoning edited by John Burnside and Maurice Riordan, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, £7.50, ISBN 1903080002 Reviewed by Roy Herbert
THIS is an anthology of poems that according to the jacket was “provoked” by Rachel Carson’s famous book, Silent Spring. At first you might think that it is a pretty delayed provocation since Carson’s book was published in 1962. After the initial uproar that followed the appearance of Silent Spring (it particularly enraged chemical companies that were fiercely promoting pesticides), its impact was diluted and it became simply an anti-technology polemic written by an eccentric. But Carson’s point was much more fundamental than that: nothing less than that if humanity could not see…
