Category: Books and Music

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.

16. Selected Poems 1966-1987, by Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990)

Though Heaney may not be the sort of poet likely to make it onto standard lists of nature-poets, few of his poems are without an almost palpable presence of the land and its inhabitants, both human and wild. This particular volume includes a number of things of likely interest to nature lovers: selections from Death of a Naturalist and Wintering Out; the bog-people poems from North; a generous selection from Field Work; and best of all, five translations from the Medieval Irish cycle Sweeney Astray, about the Ulster king who went mad and was turned into a bird, as well as Heaney’s own “Sweeney Redivivus” cycle from Station Island. Here’s an excerpt from one of the translations (or versions, as Heaney terms them), “Sweeney’s Last Poem”:

There was a time when I preferred
the turtle-dove’s soft jubilation
as it flitted round a pool
to the murmur of conversation.

There was a time when I preferred
the blackbird singing on the hill
and the stag loud against the storm
to the clinking tongue of this bell.

There was a time when I preferred
the mountain grouse crying at dawn
to the voice and closeness
of a beautiful woman.

There was a time when I preferred
wolf-packs yelping and howling
to the sheepish voice of a cleric
bleating out plainsong.

You are welcome to pledge healths
and carouse in your drinking dens;
I will dip and steal water
from a well with my open palm.

Silent reading often gives short shrift to poets like Heaney. I found an online recording of the poet reading a piece from a later collection, The Spirit Level — listen to St. Kevin and the Blackbird.

17. The Book of Medicines, by Linda Hogan (Coffee House Press, 1993)

The bear is a dark continent
that walks upright
like a man,

says Linda Hogan, and of a mountain lion, she observes,

Her power lived
in a dream of my leaving.
It was the same way
I have looked so many times at others
in clear light
before lowering my eyes
and turning away
from what lives inside those
who have found
two worlds cannot live
inside a single vision.

But it’s way too easy to find such quotes in this book of eminently quotable poems, where concern for the health of the land and the health of people — both whites and Hogan’s own Chickasaw — are closely interwoven.

There is still a little life
left inside this body,
a little wildness here
and mercy
and it is the emptiness
we love, touch, enter in one another
and try to fill.
–“Nothing”

Hogan’s is a wise voice that deserves a much wider audience.

18. Wolfwatching, by Ted Hughes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989)

Nobody mythologizes animals quite as effectively as Hughes, I think. I could’ve chosen almost any of his books for this list, but this slim volume edged out the others for its inclusion of the three-part poem, “The Black Rhino.”

This is the Black Rhino, the elastic boulder, coming at a gallop.
The boulder with a molten core, the animal missile,
Enlarging towards you. This is him in his fame —

Whose past is Behemoth, sixty million years printing the strata
Whose present is the brain-blink behind a recoiling gunsight
Whose future is a cheap watch shaken in your ear

Listen — bedrock accompanies him, a drumbeat
But his shadow over the crisp tangle of grass-tips hesitates, passes, hesitates, passes lightly
As a moth at noon

For this is the Black Rhino, who vanishes as he approaches
Every second there is less and less of him
By the time he reaches you nothing will remain, maybe, but the horn — an ornament for a lady’s lap

Extinction, like genocide, makes the imagination seize up, but for that very reason I think it is imperative for any poet of the late 20th or early 21st century to keep trying to put it into words. Hughes succeeded as well as anyone can.

19. The Way Winter Works, by Harry Humes (University of Arkansas Press, 1990)

If Pennsylvania had a poet laureate, Harry Humes would be my choice for the post. His understated-yet-powerful poems are firmly rooted in the hills and valleys of the hard coal country where he grew up and lives still. (So strong is his commitment to understatement that he has never written a poem about Centralia, the famous Pennsylvania town that had to be abandoned because of the slow fire burning underneath it in an abandoned coal mine. “Too obvious,” Humes said when I asked him about it after a poetry reading once. At least five other poets, including W.S. Merwin, haven’t suffered from any such scruples.)

More to the point here, Humes is a competent naturalist and fly fisherman who knows the names and ways of the wild, or what passes for it in the well-used landscapes of central and eastern Pennsylvania. I guess I own all of his books, and I love each one of them; The Way Winter Works simply happens to have the greatest number of personal favorites. “Deer Hunting,” for example, might well be the definitive poem on that subject, though definitiveness was probably the farthest thing from the author’s mind when he wrote it. And the book contains touches of surrealism absent from his other books, as in “The Woman Who Called Whales across the Fields.”

A lot of Humes’ poems are about memory; I hope he won’t mind if I quote one of the shorter ones in its entirety.

Sorrow near the Old House

I walk to the place in the woods
where an old foundation fills
with one season after another
and sit on the stones
to watch for copperheads and deer,
then walk along the stream to the inlet.

All of it the same.
Bats beginning their dance,
oars creaking on the lake,
the overgrown path through the meadow
with its yarrow and pearly everlasting,
the way I imagine the house,
yellow with light, watertight with children.

20. Imperfect Thirst, by Galway Kinnell (Houghton Mifflin, 1994)

This may not be the most obvious choice of a book by Kinnell to demonstrate his closeness to nature, but it is dear to me for the inclusion of a poem called “Holy Shit,” which begins with a ridiculous shit-load of epigraphs, continues with a three-page consideration of various kinds of human and animal excrement, and ends with this injunction:

Let us remember this is our home
and that we have become, we mad ones, its keepers.
Let us sit bent forward slightly, and be opened a moment,
as earth’s holy matter passes through us.

Rereading another poem, “Trees,” just now, and hearkening back to the discussion in Part 1 of this series about when and whether poets should use the proper names for things, I was struck by Kinnell’s decision to describe rather than name a woodpecker and a nuthatch:

Tok-tok-tok-tok, as from somebody
nailing upholstery, started up nearby:
the bird with a bloodmark on the back
of his head clung, cutting with
steady strokes his cave of wormwood.
On another tree, a smaller bird,
in gray rags, put her rump
to the sky and walked headfirst
down the trunk toward the earth
and the earth under the earth.

Since the poem is describing an incident from childhood, I think we are meant to understand that the narrator didn’t know the names of these birds. But think how much less wonder would’ve been communicated in these descriptions if the names had been included! By contrast, a poem called “Collusion of Elements” takes the opposite tack, in its first two lines referring to familiar garden flowers by their less familiar, full Latin names. In either case, the poet aims to strangefy, I guess:

On the riverbank Narcissus poeticus holds an ear trumpet toward the canoe apparitioning past.
Cosmos sulphureous flings back all its eyelashes and stares.

In my favorite poem in the book, “Telephoning in Mexican Sunlight,” the narrator is at a pay phone in Mexico, talking with his “beloved in New York,” when a dozen small hummingbirds start orbiting his head, attracted by the lurid color of his shirt. Rereading it, I’m thinking I like it better even than Diane Ackerman’s hummingbird poem now (see Part 2), though that of course says more about my preference for economy and punchy endings than anything else. An excerpt really wouldn’t do it justice, but fortunately the whole poem is archived at the Boston Review. Notice how here, too, an unnamed word focuses attention, and how we are permitted to guess it through the circumspect ruse of three flower names offered in its stead.

Part 1; Part 2.

11. Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1992, by Hayden Carruth (Copper Canyon Press, 1992)

Then it came to me,
this insane song, wavering music
like the cry of the genie inside his lamp,
it came from inside the long wilderness
of my life, a loon’s song, and there he was
swimming on the pond, guarding
his mate’s nest by the shore,
diving and staying under
unbelievable minutes and coming up
where no one was looking. My friend
told how once in his boyhood
he had seen a loon swimming beneath his boat,
a shape dark and powerful
down in that silent mysterious world, and how
it had ejected a plume of white excrement
curving behind. “It was beautiful,”
he said.
–“The Loon on Forrester’s Pond”

Earthy, often plain-spoken, rooted in the landscapes of New England and upstate New York: this excerpt encapsulates the major features of Hayden Carruth’s work as well as any could. His prominence as an editor (Poetry magazine, Harper’s, the anthology The Voice That Is Great Within Us) may have led some critics to overlook the fact that he’s a damn fine poet in his own right — a master of language and a virtuoso of poetic form. And imagery from the natural world is no occasional ornament, but an almost constant presence in his work.

12. Some Heaven, by Todd Davis (Michigan State University Press, 2007)

The second book of a poet with roots in Indiana and western Massachusetts, recently relocated to Central Pennsylvania. I’ve written about (and quoted from) this book before, after attending a reading by the author. Like Wendell Berry, Davis often mixes religious themes and subjects into his poems about nature and landscape. Here, for example, is the first half of the title poem:

The rabbit’s head is caught
between the slats of the fence,
and in its struggle it has turned
so the hind legs nearly touch
the nose — neck broken, lungs failing.
My boys ask me to do something
but see no mercy in my plan.
At five and eight, they are so far
away from their own deaths
that they cannot imagine the blessing
a shovel might hold, the lesson
suffering offers those who have
not suffered.

13. The Wild Iris, by Louise Glück (Ecco Press, 1992)

This book is, for my money, one of the greatest poetic achievements in English of the last thirty years: a modern book of hours from a fallen Eden in which the poet addresses a God in whom she does not believe — and God and the plants in her garden talk back. You don’t have to know anything about plants to appreciate the genius of the arrangement or the vatic intensity of the monologues, but it probably helps. Here’s the latter part of “The Red Poppy”:

I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.

14. The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer: Collected Poems, by John Haines (Graywolf Press, 1993)

Another one of my favorite books, which I’ve quoted from more than once before. A blurb on the back of my edition puts it well: “Splendidly odd, somberly beautiful. … John Haines’s spare, oracular lyrics feel as if they have come from a great distance” — from Alaska, to be precise. Haines writes about wilderness and the experience of living in it without a false note or trace of sentimentality. Picking one excerpt is challenging for me, but since I began this series by talking about the difficulty poets sometimes have in using the specific names of organisms, how about a poem which depends on such names for its effect? Here are the opening stanzas of “Mushroom Fable”; the capitalized phrases are names of fungi:

I knew them all in that age of saliva.

Soapy Tricholoma I knew,
and Blackening Russula.
I called Oak-loving Collybia
my friend, I gave her
Pig’s Ears and Witches Butter.

Born a Smoky Woodlover, I scored
with Chicken-in-the-Woods,
and cast my spawn in a Fairy Ring.
I wanted Dark-Centered Hebeloma
once, but never found her.

But I turned my back on those
tragic sisters, the False Morels;
I pitied the pale Amanitas
their bitter names
and bad complexions,
for they were beneath me.

15. The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems, by Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon Press, 1998)

It is very hard to give birds advice.
They are already members of eternity.
In their genes they have both compass
and calendar. Their wing bones are hollow.
We are surprised by how light a dead bird is.

[…]

Offenses this summer against Nature:
poured iced tea on a garter snake’s head
as he or she dozed on the elm stump,
pissed on a bumblebee (inattentive),
kicked a thousand wasps to death in my slippers.
Favors done this summer for Nature:
let the mice keep their nest in the green station wagon …

That’s from the long poem “Returning to Earth,” one of many varied treasures in this volume, which also includes 65 ghazals, the 30-part Letters to Yesenin, and an eccentric collection of 57 American Zen poems named for the equally eccentric Japanese Zen master and poet — After Ikkyí» & Other Poems. A native of Michigan dubbed “the poet laureate of appetite” by Salon magazine, Harrison is gaining fame for his fiction and nonfiction, but poetry seems his truest calling. His poems are as warm and full of humor as Haines’ are stark and grave; a fondness for nature and natural imagery is really the only thing these two, radically different poets share.

Continue to Part 4.

In Part 1 of this series, I listed four anthologies. I didn’t include any anthologies specifically of nature poetry, because I have yet to find one that’s fully satisfying — and in any case, I prefer reading single-author collections, which I’ll list alphabetically by author. Please note that this is a purely personal list, heavily influenced by serendipity. I have somewhere around 1000 books of poetry, most of them acquired by chance at sales and used bookstores. I apologize in advance to my British readers for the scarcity of British poets, for example. Books by American poets are simply a lot easier to get a hold of over here.

5. Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems, by Diane Ackerman (Vintage Books, 1991)

Ackerman’s talent for lyric verse is enormous, her knowledge about natural history extensive, and poems about non-human subjects make up the bulk of her work. Her language makes me think of a cross between Plath and Oliver, but that might not adequately convey the lushness of some of these poems. They are best savored two or three at a time, like anything rich. And the geographic scope is enormous, with a poems set everywhere from Amazonia to the Antarctic to the Bronx.

So, in the dark night of the hummingbird,
while lilies lather sweetly in the rain,
the hummingbird rests near collapse,
its quick breath halved, its rugged breath shallow,
its W-shaped tongue, as bright as Cassiopeia,
now mumbling words like wistful and wan.
The world at once drug, anthem, bright lagoon,
where its heart knew all the Morse codes
for rapture, pales into a senseless twilight.
–“The Dark Night of the Hummingbird”

6. Uplands: New Poems, by A. R. Ammons (Norton, 1970)

It took me a long time to discover that I liked Ammons’ unique style, where a love of word-music is matched by a passion for understatement. Now I wish I owned more than just this one, slim volume, in which so many poems betray a deep knowledge of the natural world. He writes about “Runoff,” for example,

quiet and clear,
never tipping enough to break sound,
slowed into marshy landrise and burst

into a bog of lupine and mirrored:
that was a place! what a place!
the soggy small marsh, nutgrass and swordweed!

And in the last two stanzas of the almost-title poem, “Upland,” Ammons deftly captures a geographic feature I’m intimately familiar with:

take the Alleghenies for example,
some quality in the air
of summit stones lying free and loose
out among the shrub trees: every

exigency seems prepared for that might
roll, bound, or give flight
to stone: that is, the stones are
pepared: they are round and ready.

7. Eyes to See Otherwise / Ojos de otro mirar: Selected Poems, by Homero Aridjis, edited by Betty Ferber and George McWhirter (New Directions, 2001)

The editors have gathered the work of multiple translators for this bilingual selection from one of Mexico’s best-known poets, who is also probably its most prominent environmental activist. Homero Aridjis grew up in the closest town to the over-wintering site of the eastern population of monarch butterflies, in Michoacán, and witnessed the destuction caused by careless logging. He went on to form the Group of 100, an association of literary and artistic intellectuals trying to draw public attention to environmental issues. (Wild nature might not have quite as large a constituency in Mexcio as it does here, but intellectuals are held in considerably higher esteem!)

Aridjis’ poetry mines historical as well as natural subjects, finding abundant tragedy and wisdom in both, as in a poem recounting the 16th-century friar Bernadino de Sahagun’s description of the birds of New Spain, or in a prose poem sequence re-envisioning the Aztec New Fire ceremony. Here’s a short poem in its entirety, spoken by some distant descendent of Jonah. I’ll substitute my own translation for the one provided.

Ballena Gris

Ballena gris,
cuando no quede de tí­ más que la imagen
de un cuerpo oscuro que iba por las aguas
del paraí­so de los animales;
cuando no haya memoria de tu paso
ni leyenda que registre tu vida,
porque no hay mar donde quepa tu muerte,
quiero poner sobre tu tumba de agua
estas cuantas palabras:

‘Ballena gris,
danos la dirrección de otro destino.’

Gray Whale

Gray whale,
when nothing is left of you but the image
of a dark body moving through the waters
of the paradise of animals,
when there is no longer any memory of your passing
nor legend to register your ever having lived,
because there is no sea that can accomodate your death,
I want to place on your watery mausoleum
these words:

Gray whale,
show us the way to another fate.

8. The Monkey’s Straw Raincoat and Other Poetry of the Basho School, introduced and translated by Earl Miner and Hiroko Odagiri (Princeton University Press, 1981)

This is really an anthology, an exception to my single-author rule here, but it’s indispensible for anyone interested in the poetry of Matsuo Bashí´ as he himself chose to present it: in multi-author haikai no renga sequences, poetic essays, and collections of hokku arranged by season. The translations are readable, and are accompanied by transcriptions of the originals and detailed notes on facing pages, which are especially useful in letting us see what sort of considerations guided the composition of a linked-verse sequence. Miner and Odagiri made the wise decision to repeat each component verse twice, so we can hear and see it as part of a tanka, and sometimes vary the translation to reflect the shifting sense. Here, for example, is how they present the first five verses of a 36-verse sequence called “Even the Kite’s Feathers.” The authors are Kyorai, Bashí´, Bonchí´, Fumikuni, and Bashí´ again.

    Even the kite’s feathers
have been tidied by the passing shower
    of early winter rain

    Even the kite’s feathers
have been tidied by the passing shower
    of early winter rain
stirred by a single puff of wind
the withered leaves grow still again

Stirred by a single puff of wind
the withered leaves grow still again
    from morning onward
his trousers have been wetted
    in crossing streams

    From morning onward
his trousers have been wetted
    in crossing streams
and he sees the bamboo bow
set to frighten badgers off

Not far from the bamboo bow
set to frighten badgers off
    and through lush ivy
crawling over the lattice door
    comes evening moonlight

9. A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, by Wendell Berry (Counterpoint, 1998)

I remember not thinking too highly of Berry when I was in my late teens and twenties, but either he changed, or I did. This book is unified both by theme and method of composition: each poem describes a walk he took on a Sunday morning in lieu of going to church, in poems that might be considered prayerful, but never preachy. Here’s how Sabbath IV from 1985 begins:

The fume and shock and uproar
of the internal combustion of America
recede, the last vacationers gone
back to the life that drives away from home.

Bottles and wrappers of expensive
cheap feasts ride the quieted current
toward the Gulf of Mexico.

And now the breeze comes down
from the hill, the kingfisher returns
to the dead limb of the sycamore,
the swallows feed in the air
over the water.

10. BioGraffiti: A Natural Selection, by John M. Burns (Norton, 1975)

As the title and subtitle suggest, this book is the naturalist’s equivalent of “Car Talk,” full of puns and other jokes only a nature nerd could love — or even understand. The introduction by Stephen Jay Gould explains how Burns, his lepidopterist colleague, used to read his light verse at every Wednesday luncheon and Natural History Seminar at Harvard. And if I hadn’t read this book and known of the connection, I wouldn’t have been able to decode the ending of one of Gould’s later essays. He was taking a former colleague and erstwhile supporter to task for his attacks on Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium, and his last paragraph builds up to an apparently innocent repetition of the Delphic maxim, “Know thyself.” However, it’s also the complete text of the shortest, and hence most memorable, poem in Burns’ book — a poem which I suspect would’ve been well known to the target of Gould’s essay. It’s accompanied by an engraving of a snail:

To a Lonely Hermaphrodite

Know
Thyself.

A poem about fern reproduction is entitled, “One Good Fern Deserves Another.” The second stanza adequately conveys the flavor of the book:

Up springs the frondly sporophyte,
        with rhizome, root, and rachis
And a meristem that’s apical and tight.
It uncoils; but on a leaf that is preparing for meiosis
Sporangia in clusters make a very sori sight.

Continue to Part 3.