Nature is a unifying force -- from the melting glaciers that threaten all island and coastal regions, to the rise in global temperatures that has brought once-distant diseases like the West Nile Virus to areas in the Northern United States. We are being made increasingly aware of how linked the entire human race is, through our environments.
It is therefore appropriate that editors Robert Pack and Jay Parini have collected a variety of poetic voices to "respond to the destruction of nature," as Parini says in a quote on the back cover of the collection Poems for a Small Planet: Contemporary American Nature Poetry. He states "nature is now a pressing political question, a question of survival." It is a pressing question not only for the activists who protest globalization, nuclear power, and over-development. Nor is it a question only for the lawmakers. It is also a question for artists who try to reflect and interpret their surroundings. Poets of all races, ages, religions and poetic styles address the subject of nature at some point in their art. It is inevitable that they are influences by their surroundings.
Pack and Parini solicited poems on the subject of nature from a diverse array of eight-three poets from Julia Alvarez to Edward Hirsch, Rita Dove to David Lehman. Many of the poets represented in this collection have chosen traditional rhymes or forms for their poems. Charles Martin chose the interesting Rubai form (four-line stanza, aaba rhymed, iambic pentameter) for his poem "What the Dark Proposes":
A few last tattered bits of marked-down light:
But this the hills had kept out of their sight.
Seeing beyond them was beyond them both,
Who saw no further than the coming night,
A room that would be there as certainly
As was the ocean which they could not see
Personally, I have a problem with merely descriptive verse about nature. I feel that it is not enough to say a tree was green in a dense forest. For me, poetry is at its best when it really speaks to me, brings relevance to the world around me -- tells me WHY I should be concerned with that green tree in the dense forest.
There are some very fine examples of this type of poetry in Poems for a Small Planet. Dana Gioia's "Becoming a Redwood" really pulls you into the seemingly inanimate objects that are the poem's subjects:
Yes, it's hard to stand still, hour after hour,
fixed as a fencepost, hearing the steers
snort in the dark pasture, smelling the manure.
And paralyzed by the mystery of how a stone
can bear to be a stone, the pain
the grass endures breaking through the earth's crust.
I could go on with more snippets of other poems, but won't. I will merely recommend that all you nature lovers out there pick up a copy of this fine collection, and celebrate the world around you.
Essays by Pack and Parini on the history of nature in poetry and literature frame this collection, which is one of the "Bread Loaf Anthology" series sponsored by the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference at Middlebury College.
