The Dolphin's Arc: Poems on Endangered Creatures of the Sea

editor Elisavietta Ritchie

Take a moment to peek inside The Dolphin's Arc.

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From Editor's Note

Poets are by nature, I think, environmentalists. As the poems in this anthology suggest, we not only draw inspiration from the natural world, but are deeply concerned about it. Environmentalists, working close to nature, fighting to preserve it, live amid the raw stuff of poetry.

I conceived of this anthology to reach both scientific and literary audiences…. I sent out a call for poems on whales, dolphins, sea turtles, seals and sea lions. Poems poured in…some celebrating walruses, sea elephants, sea cows—even one octopus….

Although a number of worthy poems ultimately didn't make the cut, the final 109-poem collection includes poems from 32 states and one from Chile in both English and Spanish.

As if poetry could halt a slaughter! Like hurling a pebble at an armored tank. As Deena Metzger writes, "If it were only a question of whales." We face (or avoid) so many immense problems—the threat of nuclear war, actual wars forever breaking out somewhere on the globe, constant universal dangers of pollution, hunger homelessness, disease, overpopulation man's inhumanity to man—and to animals…

As Richard Wilbur writes,
"…Where should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,
These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?"