LETTERS Ten Most Vaunted My familyand Ihave worked ourway through J. Madison Davis's listof top tencrimenovels (WLT, January 2006; see inset),and Iwould like to thank you forputting it together. Ithas been the source ofmuch discussion and enjoyment! Some on the list I had already read, but others were new tome. There isonly one thatIhave been unable toget in translation,Points and Lines byMatsumoto, but I will keep trying. Thanks again. I always appreciate being exposed to new material. Diane Molloy Melbourne Poetry and the Environment About Michael Ziser's review of Can Poetry Save theEarth?A Field Guide to Nature Poems (WLT,No vember 2009, 75): to revisit so dismissive a treat ment of one's book entails a certain sourness, but sowould letting itgo unanswered. The book "is anything but an extended inquiry into the envi ronmental virtues of nature poetry," Ziser de clares. How so? Because it doesn't resemble two otherbooks he names?which in facthave sharply different approaches and audiences than mine. Mine manages a "defense ofpoetry's alleged abil ityto inculcate habits of attention and reflection." Poetry's "alleged" ability? Coleridge, Dickinson, Hopkins, Yeats, Stevens, Moore, Bishop, Lowell, Levertov alleged? Can Poetry Save the Earth? is faulted for "including poets rarely considered for theiratten tiveness to the natural world." So much the better, one would think. My Millay chapter shows her joyously rooted in roughMaine coastal life,then settlingdeep intoupstate New York woodlands. Defending Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, shewrote an angry, anguished elegywhere theirelectrocu tion leaves us "a blighted earth to till /With a broken hoe." Having missed "the environmental virtues of nature poetry" inmy book, Ziser totally ignores itspatently environmental poets: JohnClare dam aged by the Enclosures, Hopkins with his felled poplars, Lawrence's slaughtered mountain lion, Jeffers's"Organic wholeness, thewholeness of lifeand things?Love that,notman /Apart from that," Roethke's eye for terrestrial spoilage, Staf ford, Merwin, Hughes, Haines, Ammons, Lever tov,Walcott, Snyder. 10 Greatest Crime Novels of All Time? J. Madison Davis Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment Friedrich D?rrenmatt, The Judge and His Hangman Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon Choderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons JohnLeCarr?,TheSpyWho Came infromtheCold Seicho Matsumoto, Points and Lines Maj Sj?wall & Peter Wahl??, The LaughingPoliceman I'm cited for omitting Charles Olson, Wen dell Berry,Robert Hass, though I specify thatCan Poetry Save theEarth? "stops with Gary Snyder (born 1930)," focusing on a poetic traditionpre ceding modern environmentalism, and that E>erry, Hass, along with ScottMomaday, Mary Oliver, and many others "are working on fresh terrain and deserve a chronicle of their own." Charles Olson??a possibility, but my real sadness is hav ingomitted David Wagoner, with his devotion to thePacificNorthwest and itsnative tribes. Ziser dismisses my "very conservative approach," my "outdated critical method," where as my preface announces and every page demon strates that Can Poetry Save the Earth?, jargon-free, aims in clear-minded, self-sufficient chapters to bring poetry alive for the common reader, letting attentiveness towhat happens in poems model our attentiveness to the nature they present. Countless people around the country, along with the living poets I consider, have thankedme forthis. John Felstiner Stanford University Have a comment or suggestion? Send a letterto the editor via the feedback link on ourwebsite ormail to: WLT Letters 630 ParringtonOval, Suite 110 UniversityofOklahoma Norman,OK 73019-4033 USA 41World Literature Today ...