Wild Song: Poems of the Natural World

by John Daniel (Editor), Deborah Randolph Wildman (Illustrations)

Here are eighty-three poems on the eternal and timely themes of nature, written by both eminent poets and emerging talents. In various forms of verse, they bring to these pages a vigorous diversity of creatures, weathers, and landscapes from all regions of America. They decry ecological injuries, celebrate nature's beauties and point to its many mysteries, and bear witness to our ever-available opportunity to recognize ourselves as rightful members of the evolutionary flow of earthly life.

Poetry has a distinct and indispensable role to play in our evolving relationship with the natural world that we are at the same time part of and estranged from. Along with a scientific understanding of nature, we need just as crucially―more crucially, perhaps―a revived imaginal awareness, a knowledge based in heart and bodily systems. The diverse poems in this collection, most of them first published in Wilderness magazine, offer visions of the wildness within and around us all the time, even in the places we have altered most.

This exquisite collection contains illustrations by Deborah Randolph Wildman, adding spirit and charm to make Wild Song a lovely gift for spring and for every season.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1998

About the author

Born in South Carolina and raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., John Daniel has lived in the West since 1966. After attending and dropping out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, he worked as a logger, railroad inspector, rock climbing instructor, hod carrier, and poet-in-the-schools. He began to write poetry and prose in the 1970s while living on a ranch in south-central Oregon. In 1982 he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, where he then took an M.A. in English/Creative Writing and taught five years as a Jones Lecturer in Poetry and a lecturer in Freshman English. He now makes his living as a writer and itinerant teacher in workshops and writer-in-residence positions around the country. 

Reviews

[Lizzy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mixed bag- some resonate, some do not. Unsurprisingly, the ones by famous writers like Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry are among the best. Some are overly simplistic and simply read like lists of elements of the natural world that the author likes.

[Whitney Chandler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only connected with about half the poems in the collection which led to the three stars

[Vasha7 · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a joy to read through this anthology. The editor John Daniel contributed one poem, "Spring Burning", which is a good one, and he has equally good taste in choosing other people's work. The introduction indicates that the poetry page of Wilderness magazine, where Daniel first printed most of these selections, became highly popular, and he was receiving three to four thousand submissions a year, as well as soliciting some. Eighty-three gems chosen, then, from famous and little-known poets.

The attitudes of the poets vary; while many evoke moments of connection, either with another living being (for example the robin in "In Late October" by E. G. Burrows) or with something vast ("Camping in the Cascades" by Joseph Powell), others express doubt ("San Rafael Mountain" by Paul Willis) or the knowledge that they cannot know or harmonize with nature. Some writers, like Wendell Berry, have an explicitly Christian point of view, others not. I can hardly begin to list all the poems I liked on first reading: "Another Little God" and "In My Time" by Pattiann Rogers; "Byng Inlet, Ontario" by Marc Harshman; "Cygnet" by Tom Sexton; "Arches" and "The Grand Canyon" by Stephen Lefebure; "Artichoke" by Jody Gladding; "The River" by C. L. Rawlins; "A Slant Message" and "Walking at the Beach" by William Stafford; "The Raven" by Reg Saner; "The Road Is Not a Metaphor" and "What Is There" by Carol Snyder Halberstadt; "On the Beach" by Jane Hirshfeld; "Early Snow" by Joseph Powell; "The Ghost Towns" by John Haines; "Lonely, White Fields" by Mary Oliver"; "Blackbirds" by Russell Kesler; "The Naturalist" by Leonard Nathan; "Fishing: The Late Wish" by Greg Glazner... I'm overlooking some there, I know, and really I'd have to list three-quarters of the table of contents.