Dwelling:
an ecopoem
Scott Edward Anderson’s Dwelling: an ecopoem, winner of a Nautilus Book Award, is a sequence of poems—and prose “questions”—that initiated as a conversation with Martin Heidegger’s essay, “Building Dwelling Thinking.” The poems depart from there to explore the nature of our dwelling on earth, how we conceive of our place and concept of home. The prose questions further explore the concepts offered by the poems while trying to define what makes an ecopoem and touching on the complicated relationship between Heidegger and the poet Paul Celan. Poet and essayist Alison Hawthorne Deming has called Dwelling: an ecopoem “a phenomenology of how we live on the Earth.”
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Praise for Dwelling: an ecopoem
“In the spirit of Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island and The Practice of the Wild, Scott Edward Anderson leads us on a journey into place and the idea of place. That journey is driven by the burning questions of how we find a home on this planet, in this transient, often-brutal world, and how we heal through home. Anderson writes profoundly of ‘learning a place, intimately’ and the way that ‘Home inhabits you,’ and if you follow him, or better yet dwell with him for a while, you may find your own ideas deepening, growing and, with luck, taking root.”
— David Gessner, author of All the Wild That Remains and Return of the Osprey
“In an age defined by too much thoughtless building, Anderson returns poetry to its ancient vocation of saving, healing, giving back.”
— Jonathan Skinner, founder and editor of ecopoetics
“With the timelessness of art and the urgency of urban design, Scott Edward Anderson creates an ideal mixed-use development of poetry, ecology, philosophy, and ethics suffused by psalm, elegy, meditation, and ode. Dwelling: an ecopoem rings with -ings, the ending that means continuing, the suffix that propagates nouns from verbs. Through the lyric intimacy of couplets, the rhythmic breath of anaphora, the architecture of logic, the intentionality of hands-on practice, Anderson essays his own poetics of space, and in doing so he ushers us—"diving deep/ into the soil and breathing it all in”—into the home of this world.”
— Laura-Gray Street, author of Pigment and Fume and co-editor of The Ecopoetry Anthology
“Scott Edward Anderson’s Dwelling: an ecopoem is very beautiful and moving and lyric, and the definition poems, running across as a footer, feel like a little whisper along the bottom of the page, seeming somehow intimate.”
— Erin Belieu, author of Slant Six: Poems
“Scott Edward Anderson’s poems in Dwelling are probing and important — this is a fine and urgent volume.”
— Sudeep Sen, author of Fractals: New & Selected Poems
“Dwelling by Scott Edward Anderson, delves deeply into this subject in the form of a book-length eco-poem. It began as a reaction to Martin Heidegger’s essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ and, in Anderson’s lyrical writing, took on a book-length life of its own. He asks questions such as “Do we carry home within?” Anderson’s poetic probing explores our place, not only inside a home, but in the larger world that is home to us all.”
— Christopher Woods, review in New Pages
“Poetry forces one to think in a much different way, and the way the sequence built into the multi-layered essays (as well as the definitions running along the bottom of each page) offered a viewpoint on a new way of being and thinking toward nature and the environment. I would recommend this collection for anyone interested in the future of humanity and how it might reincorporate with the planet.”
— John Abraham, review of Dwelling on johnabrahamwatne.com
