Ever since Eve plucked a tempting apple in the Garden of Eden, the fruits of the earth have been essential to human culture and the stories we tell about our world. Poets from ancient times to the present have celebrated the harvest of our gardens, fields, and orchards.

The delectable cornucopia of poems harvested in this volume includes many beloved old chestnuts, such as Robert Frost’s ‘After Apple-Picking’, Emily Dickinson’s ‘Forbidden Fruit a flavor has’, Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘The Bean Eaters’, and the famous chilled plums in William Carlos Williams’s ‘This Is Just to Say’.