pagesofjulia

First of all, for those who know me, you will appreciate that this title grabbed my attention pretty hard. I like nature; I like poetry with a little more reservation (such that I’ve waited about a year since this book’s publication to pick it up), but I was intrigued. This anthology was put together by Ada Limón, our national poet laureate (still current as I type). It begins with a foreword by Carla Hayden, librarian of Congress (also current as of now), in a lovely single page; Limón’s three-page introduction is even more moving, describing an important tree and a choice. “When I was first asked what I wanted to create for a national poetry project during my tenure as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, I remember staring out the window of my office in the Library of Congress thinking, I just want us all to write poems and save the planet.” She immediately recognizes this impulse as both unlikely and vital. She invites us all to write our own poems alongside those in these pages, exhorts us to do something, to offer something back. “Because nature is not a place to visit. Nature is who we are.”

It feels appropriate, then, that the collection opens with Carrie Fountain’s “You Belong to the World,” which remains one of my favorites. (Fountain was recently the poet laureate of Texas.) This is followed by 49 more poems by just over 50 poets (there is I think just one collaboration), all American poets and all contemporary, just a handful previously published (and all of those in either The Atlantic or the New Yorker, go figure). They come in a variety of lengths, forms, and styles, and while they all deal with ‘nature,’ they approach that rather broad, abstract subject in different ways. Some describe or love or appreciate (or fear) a specific species or being; some consider fire, water shortages, and other crises; many dwell at the intersection of people with ‘nature’ (although, as Limón and Fountain remind us, those are not separate). Some I find pleasingly literal and narrative (remember I fear poetry at least a little). I have a more difficult time with the further-reaching figurative ones, and some I had to allow to just be sound that washes over. Ah well. Here are my favorite poems of the fifty:
“You Belong to the World,” Carrie Fountain
“When the Fact of the Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then You Are Truly Alongside,” Donika Kelly
“Eat,” Joy Harjo
“Letters,” Ilya Kaminsky
“Rabbitbrush,” Molly McCully Brown
“Lighthouse,” Ellen Bass
“Mouth of the Canyon,” Traci Brimhall
“Aerial View,” Jericho Brown (he wants to be a giraffe!)
“Canine Superpowers,” Michael Kleber-Diggs
“Hackberry,” Cecily Parks
“Taking the Magnolia,” Paisley Rekdal (common thread: I like tree poems)
“Darkling I Listen,” Adam Clay
“Remembering a honeymoon hike near Drakes Bay, California, while I cook our dinner at the feet of Colorado’s Front Range,” Camille T. Dungy (I confess I was waiting for a love poem)
“Heliophilia,” Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“Twenty Minutes in the Backyard,” Alberto Ríos
“To Little Black Girls, Risking Flower,” Patricia Smith
“Reasons to Live,” Ruth Awad
and let me give you the last two lines of one poem (Eduardo C. Corral’s “To a Blooming Saguaro”) and the first two lines of the next one (Diane Seuss’s “Nature, Which Cannot be Driven To”):
“My mother is my favorite immigrant. / After her? The sonnet.”
“To drive to it is to drive through it. / Like a stalker, it is in the back seat of the car.”

Well. That’s nearly half of the poems. Not bad, hey?

Even though poetry is scary, join me in giving it a try. It helps to read aloud. Write poems and save the planet. Sit under a tree.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: nature, poetry |