A Chorus for the Earth:
101 Poems on Climate Change
(Editor: Dr. Gurpreet Kaur)
Reviewed by
Dr. Devinder Pal Singh
Editor: Dr. Gurpreet Kaur, Assistant Professor & Head, P. G. Department of English, SGTB Khalsa College, Sri Anandpur Sahib, Punjab, India
Publication Year: 2025, Pages: 258, Price: $30.45, ISBN: 9789371822367
Publisher: Ukiyoto Publishing
Book Reviewer: Dr. Devinder Pal Singh, Director, Canbridge Learning, Toronto, Canada
101 Voices, One Damaged Planet
A Chorus for the Earth: 101 Poems on Climate Change is a powerful and deeply felt anthology of poetry that gathers 101 voices: students, scholars, musicians, diplomats, and seasoned poets from across continents into a single sustained meditation on the climate crisis. Edited by Dr. Gurpreet Kaur, the collection positions itself explicitly as a counterweight to the North-centric tenor of much existing climate literature. In his preface, Johan Höglund, Professor of English at Linnaeus University, Sweden, situates the book within the broader idea that humanity is living through a new extinction event, one some call the Anthropocene and others the Capitalocene, a term meant to underscore that responsibility for ecological ruin is unevenly distributed among humans rather than shared equally by the species as a whole. Höglund's central claim is that most existing climate poetry comes from wealthy nation-states for which ecological collapse remains largely a future problem, whereas the poems gathered here bear witness to a version of that future that has, in many parts of the world, already arrived. This anthology, he argues, does not offer solutions, but it refuses to let readers look away from the questions.
That framing gives the book its organizing energy, and Kaur's own introduction extends it. She describes the collection as more than an anthology: a convergence of conscience, creativity, and care, in which poets, educators, students, peace ambassadors, and environmentalists from across continents rise together to speak for the planet. The 101 poems are not grouped by theme or geography but allowed to drift into one another, an arrangement Kaur says is intentional, meant to mirror the unpredictability of nature itself. Elegies for vanished rivers and forests sit beside hymns of stubborn renewal; indictments of "green" capitalism sit beside quiet, meditative lyrics about bees, snow, and monsoon rain. The emotional arc Kaur describes, beginning in hope, moving through grief and critique, and returning to reflection and regeneration, a cycle she likens to birth, decay, and renewal, is a fair description of how the book actually reads, even across 258 pages and dozens of unrelated hands.
A Kaleidoscope of Contributors
What distinguishes this anthology from a simple themed collection is the sheer range of people it brings together, and Kaur's introduction takes care to walk through many of them individually, effectively doubling as a reader's guide. Some poems, she notes, evoke landscapes teetering on the edge of collapse, where silence and sound seem to clash; others confront mortality directly, insisting that the fate of humanity cannot be separated from that of the Earth. Elegiac poems mourning what has already been lost are deliberately placed alongside hymns of resilience that refuse to let despair have the final word. Kaur is explicit that these poems do not shy away from darkness, but they do not let it consume them.
Several contributors receive particular attention in Kaur's framing, and reading their poems against her commentary sharpens the anthology's overall shape. Gautam Mal's "Please Don't Marketise Everything," singled out as a work confronting the commodification of nature, is built almost as an incantation: its refrain against turning "everything" into a market transaction, earthworms, oases, kingfishers, footpath flowers, repeats across several stanzas with the insistence of a protest chant. It is unsubtle by design, but effective for exactly the pedagogical purpose Kaur has in mind for the book. Hridyanshi Sharma's "The Ethereal Temple Flowers" is positioned as its spiritual counterpart, celebrating nature's aesthetic and sacred dimensions rather than indicting its exploitation, and the pairing of the two in Kaur's introduction is a useful illustration of how the anthology works by juxtaposition rather than sequence.
Kaur discusses her own poem, "When the Rivers Wept," as a depiction of nature turning to wrath during the Punjab floods, with an impact she frames as universal rather than regional, and the poem bears this out. It is among the collection's most affecting pieces precisely because it refuses generality, moving from the intimate texture of disaster: homes giving way like paper boats, grain sacks heavy with grief, technology rendered helpless, toward the specific cultural resources a community draws on to endure. Gurudwaras fill with devotees, langar fires flicker against the wind, and the poem closes not on loss but on a soaked and battered Punjab quietly finding the strength to sow again, sing again, and rise again.
The anthology also makes room for voices that unsettle received narratives about environmental harmony. Ifeoma Ezinne Odinye's "I Sing for Blackness" and Sneha Rakshit's "The Dilemma of Our Mother Nature" are highlighted by Kaur as poems that challenge dominant framings of what it means to live in harmony, or in conflict, with the Earth. Elsewhere, the book turns toward indigenous wisdom and ancestral memory: poems like "The Dance of the Doves" and "Forest Fairies" are framed as evidence that environmental stewardship is not a modern invention but a sacred inheritance.
The contributors' generational range is one of the anthology's more quietly impressive features. Disha Katherine Joseph's "Solace," a meditation on sea waves and emotional renewal, opens the anthology's more lyrical register, and Devinder Pal Singh's "Whispers of a Warming World" and "No Map for the Wind" mourn ecological exploitation while calling for collective healing through poetic empathy. K. Bhavadharini, a Carnatic-trained musician and environmentalist, brings a distinct musicality and spiritual reverence to "National Threat," while Rohini Batra, whose research spans ecohumanities and Indian Knowledge Systems, contributes verses Kaur describes as marked by scholarly grace and a deep commitment to ethical transformation. The book's international reach shows in Elmaya Jabbarova, a decorated peace ambassador writing from Azerbaijan, whose poem "Let's Save Our World" carries diplomatic resonance, and in Jorge Palma and Martha Vaskandira, whose poems "It's Just Thunder" and "Eternal Love" bring a maternal, personal register to the collection's public concerns.
Emerging and student voices are given equal weight rather than being treated as a supplementary category. Hima S. Dev, a postgraduate student from Kerala, contributes "Black Snow," which Kaur credits with affirming that poetic insight often blooms early; Meera Venkatesh's "Soul Sister" is framed as an invitation to meditative stillness; and Devanshi Gakhreja's "The Banyan's Last Song" is a haunting elegy for vanishing ecosystems, rich in metaphor, mourning the fading presence of sacred trees. Usha Praveena's "Hubris!!" and Susminder Jeet Kaur's paired poems "Beyond Thirst, Toward Hope" and "Where the Green Shadows Breathe" round out this cluster, the latter reflecting on how ecological healing begins where greenery is allowed to thrive. Debolina Mukherjee's "A Bird's Eye View and You" is singled out for bringing academic precision to the anthology's thematic core, while Aparna Sharma's "Monsoon," shaped by the poet's own experience of disaster-struck Himachal Pradesh, closes this survey on a note of disruption met by endurance.
Reading the Poems Themselves
The strongest material in the anthology tends to come from poems anchored in specific, lived catastrophe rather than abstract lament, and Abhyudita S. Singha's opening poem, "Train Whistles on the Shepherd's Trail," is a good example: it uses the literal collision of a shepherd's traditional call and a tourist toy-train's whistle in the Himalayas as a compact allegory for the displacement of older ecological relationships by extraction dressed up as progress and pleasure. The book's closing poem, "Elegy for a Lost World," swings toward speculative dystopia, imagining a fully mechanized, post-human future in which people no longer breathe but are powered, their bodies reduced to batteries and their emotions filed away as data no one opens anymore. It is a register the anthology otherwise mostly avoids, and its placement at the very end gives the collection a stark, cautionary final note before the book moves into its extensive contributor biographies.
Because this is a multi-author anthology of largely non-professional and early-career poets, the quality is understandably uneven. Some poems achieve genuine compression and image control; others rely on abstraction, exclamation points, and stacked adjectives to signal urgency rather than earn it. Readers coming to this book purely for polished lyric craft may find themselves wishing for a firmer editorial hand in places. But judged by its own stated ambitions, as a communal, pedagogically minded chorus rather than a curated best-of, the unevenness feels like a feature rather than a flaw. Kaur is explicit that the anthology is meant to model how poetry can be used in classrooms, workshops, and community dialogues, and the presence of student voices alongside established academics and international literary figures is clearly intentional rather than accidental. Poetry here is treated not as a solitary act but as a communal offering: a way to listen, respond, and act.
The book's back matter reinforces this scholarly-pedagogical framing: extensive contributor biographies detail the poets' academic affiliations and research interests; several work in ecocriticism, trauma studies, Blue Humanities, and the environmental humanities more broadly, and Kaur's own substantial publication history, including multiple prior edited volumes on climate fiction and eco-critical literature, situates this anthology as one installment in an ongoing, deliberate project of building an Indian and Global South archive of climate writing.
A Verdict
Ultimately, A Chorus for the Earth succeeds less as a tightly curated literary object than as an act of collective witness. Its value lies in scale and geography as much as in any single poem's craft: 101 different vantage points on a single unfolding disaster, most of them writing from places where the disaster is not hypothetical. Read together, Kaur's editorial framing and the poems themselves make a coherent case that climate grief and climate hope are not opposites but companions; that the Earth's chorus, as the preface puts it, is a song of suffering, not one of oblivion. For readers, educators, and students interested in ecopoetics, environmental humanities, or Indian and Global South literary responses to climate change, this is a rich and genuinely useful resource; one better read a handful of poems at a time than in a single sitting, so that each voice retains its own weight within the larger chorus.
The book is recommended for classrooms and reading groups focused on ecocriticism and environmental humanities, readers seeking Global South perspectives on climate change, and anyone drawn to poetry anthologies organized around communal witness rather than individual polish.
That framing gives the book its organizing energy, and Kaur's own introduction extends it. She describes the collection as more than an anthology: a convergence of conscience, creativity, and care, in which poets, educators, students, peace ambassadors, and environmentalists from across continents rise together to speak for the planet. The 101 poems are not grouped by theme or geography but allowed to drift into one another, an arrangement Kaur says is intentional, meant to mirror the unpredictability of nature itself. Elegies for vanished rivers and forests sit beside hymns of stubborn renewal; indictments of "green" capitalism sit beside quiet, meditative lyrics about bees, snow, and monsoon rain. The emotional arc Kaur describes, beginning in hope, moving through grief and critique, and returning to reflection and regeneration, a cycle she likens to birth, decay, and renewal, is a fair description of how the book actually reads, even across 258 pages and dozens of unrelated hands.
A Kaleidoscope of Contributors
What distinguishes this anthology from a simple themed collection is the sheer range of people it brings together, and Kaur's introduction takes care to walk through many of them individually, effectively doubling as a reader's guide. Some poems, she notes, evoke landscapes teetering on the edge of collapse, where silence and sound seem to clash; others confront mortality directly, insisting that the fate of humanity cannot be separated from that of the Earth. Elegiac poems mourning what has already been lost are deliberately placed alongside hymns of resilience that refuse to let despair have the final word. Kaur is explicit that these poems do not shy away from darkness, but they do not let it consume them.
Several contributors receive particular attention in Kaur's framing, and reading their poems against her commentary sharpens the anthology's overall shape. Gautam Mal's "Please Don't Marketise Everything," singled out as a work confronting the commodification of nature, is built almost as an incantation: its refrain against turning "everything" into a market transaction, earthworms, oases, kingfishers, footpath flowers, repeats across several stanzas with the insistence of a protest chant. It is unsubtle by design, but effective for exactly the pedagogical purpose Kaur has in mind for the book. Hridyanshi Sharma's "The Ethereal Temple Flowers" is positioned as its spiritual counterpart, celebrating nature's aesthetic and sacred dimensions rather than indicting its exploitation, and the pairing of the two in Kaur's introduction is a useful illustration of how the anthology works by juxtaposition rather than sequence.
Kaur discusses her own poem, "When the Rivers Wept," as a depiction of nature turning to wrath during the Punjab floods, with an impact she frames as universal rather than regional, and the poem bears this out. It is among the collection's most affecting pieces precisely because it refuses generality, moving from the intimate texture of disaster: homes giving way like paper boats, grain sacks heavy with grief, technology rendered helpless, toward the specific cultural resources a community draws on to endure. Gurudwaras fill with devotees, langar fires flicker against the wind, and the poem closes not on loss but on a soaked and battered Punjab quietly finding the strength to sow again, sing again, and rise again.
The anthology also makes room for voices that unsettle received narratives about environmental harmony. Ifeoma Ezinne Odinye's "I Sing for Blackness" and Sneha Rakshit's "The Dilemma of Our Mother Nature" are highlighted by Kaur as poems that challenge dominant framings of what it means to live in harmony, or in conflict, with the Earth. Elsewhere, the book turns toward indigenous wisdom and ancestral memory: poems like "The Dance of the Doves" and "Forest Fairies" are framed as evidence that environmental stewardship is not a modern invention but a sacred inheritance.
The contributors' generational range is one of the anthology's more quietly impressive features. Disha Katherine Joseph's "Solace," a meditation on sea waves and emotional renewal, opens the anthology's more lyrical register, and Devinder Pal Singh's "Whispers of a Warming World" and "No Map for the Wind" mourn ecological exploitation while calling for collective healing through poetic empathy. K. Bhavadharini, a Carnatic-trained musician and environmentalist, brings a distinct musicality and spiritual reverence to "National Threat," while Rohini Batra, whose research spans ecohumanities and Indian Knowledge Systems, contributes verses Kaur describes as marked by scholarly grace and a deep commitment to ethical transformation. The book's international reach shows in Elmaya Jabbarova, a decorated peace ambassador writing from Azerbaijan, whose poem "Let's Save Our World" carries diplomatic resonance, and in Jorge Palma and Martha Vaskandira, whose poems "It's Just Thunder" and "Eternal Love" bring a maternal, personal register to the collection's public concerns.
Emerging and student voices are given equal weight rather than being treated as a supplementary category. Hima S. Dev, a postgraduate student from Kerala, contributes "Black Snow," which Kaur credits with affirming that poetic insight often blooms early; Meera Venkatesh's "Soul Sister" is framed as an invitation to meditative stillness; and Devanshi Gakhreja's "The Banyan's Last Song" is a haunting elegy for vanishing ecosystems, rich in metaphor, mourning the fading presence of sacred trees. Usha Praveena's "Hubris!!" and Susminder Jeet Kaur's paired poems "Beyond Thirst, Toward Hope" and "Where the Green Shadows Breathe" round out this cluster, the latter reflecting on how ecological healing begins where greenery is allowed to thrive. Debolina Mukherjee's "A Bird's Eye View and You" is singled out for bringing academic precision to the anthology's thematic core, while Aparna Sharma's "Monsoon," shaped by the poet's own experience of disaster-struck Himachal Pradesh, closes this survey on a note of disruption met by endurance.
Reading the Poems Themselves
The strongest material in the anthology tends to come from poems anchored in specific, lived catastrophe rather than abstract lament, and Abhyudita S. Singha's opening poem, "Train Whistles on the Shepherd's Trail," is a good example: it uses the literal collision of a shepherd's traditional call and a tourist toy-train's whistle in the Himalayas as a compact allegory for the displacement of older ecological relationships by extraction dressed up as progress and pleasure. The book's closing poem, "Elegy for a Lost World," swings toward speculative dystopia, imagining a fully mechanized, post-human future in which people no longer breathe but are powered, their bodies reduced to batteries and their emotions filed away as data no one opens anymore. It is a register the anthology otherwise mostly avoids, and its placement at the very end gives the collection a stark, cautionary final note before the book moves into its extensive contributor biographies.
Because this is a multi-author anthology of largely non-professional and early-career poets, the quality is understandably uneven. Some poems achieve genuine compression and image control; others rely on abstraction, exclamation points, and stacked adjectives to signal urgency rather than earn it. Readers coming to this book purely for polished lyric craft may find themselves wishing for a firmer editorial hand in places. But judged by its own stated ambitions, as a communal, pedagogically minded chorus rather than a curated best-of, the unevenness feels like a feature rather than a flaw. Kaur is explicit that the anthology is meant to model how poetry can be used in classrooms, workshops, and community dialogues, and the presence of student voices alongside established academics and international literary figures is clearly intentional rather than accidental. Poetry here is treated not as a solitary act but as a communal offering: a way to listen, respond, and act.
The book's back matter reinforces this scholarly-pedagogical framing: extensive contributor biographies detail the poets' academic affiliations and research interests; several work in ecocriticism, trauma studies, Blue Humanities, and the environmental humanities more broadly, and Kaur's own substantial publication history, including multiple prior edited volumes on climate fiction and eco-critical literature, situates this anthology as one installment in an ongoing, deliberate project of building an Indian and Global South archive of climate writing.
A Verdict
Ultimately, A Chorus for the Earth succeeds less as a tightly curated literary object than as an act of collective witness. Its value lies in scale and geography as much as in any single poem's craft: 101 different vantage points on a single unfolding disaster, most of them writing from places where the disaster is not hypothetical. Read together, Kaur's editorial framing and the poems themselves make a coherent case that climate grief and climate hope are not opposites but companions; that the Earth's chorus, as the preface puts it, is a song of suffering, not one of oblivion. For readers, educators, and students interested in ecopoetics, environmental humanities, or Indian and Global South literary responses to climate change, this is a rich and genuinely useful resource; one better read a handful of poems at a time than in a single sitting, so that each voice retains its own weight within the larger chorus.
The book is recommended for classrooms and reading groups focused on ecocriticism and environmental humanities, readers seeking Global South perspectives on climate change, and anyone drawn to poetry anthologies organized around communal witness rather than individual polish.
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