Jane Mead dies at 61; poet’s work was inspired by the natural world

Jane Mead, an American poet whose work was largely inspired by her love of nature and the interconnections between organisms and their environments, has died. She was a Griffin Poetry Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist for her 2016 book “World of Made and Unmade,” about her mother’s death. Former Times poetry contributor Carol Muske-Dukes wrote in 2017 that “Mead’s poems reveal a compassionate aesthetic imagination.” In an excerpt from the book, Mead writes: The third time my mother fell she stopped saying she wanted to die. Her previous book “Money Money Money Water Water Water,” a work of ecopoetry, explores the widespread destruction of the natural world. In a 2014 interview with the now-defunct literary blog Bookslut, Mead talks about the relationship between poetry and nature: “Given the nearly complete destruction of an entire planet, the overpowering by greed of any sense of the basic logic of survival, or valuation of beauty — it would be odd if the urgency of this situation were not reflected in our poetry.” She spoke also about the influence poetry can have in preserving nature: “But poetry has the potential to move people, which is where the potential for growth and change of a certain kind enters the picture.” Remembered as gentle and intelligent, she was admired for her deep compassion.