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Doomstead Days
Doomstead Days is a lyrical series of experiments in embodied ecological consciousness. Drafted on foot, these site-specific poems document rivers, cities, forests, oil spills, mountains, and apocalyptic visions. They encounter refineries and urban watersheds, megafauna and industrial toxins, each encounter intertwining ordinary life and ongoing environmental crisis. Days pass: wartime days, days of love and sex, sixth extinction days, days of chronic illness, all of them doomstead days. Through these poems, we experience the pleasure and pain of being a body during global climate change.
176 pages, Paperback
First published April 2, 2019
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262 people want to read
About the author
Brian Teare
20 books71 followersA former National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Brian Teare is the recipient of poetry fellowships from the Pew Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the American Antiquarian Society, the Fund for Poetry, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. He is the author of The Room Where I Was Born, Sight Map, the Lambda-award winning Pleasure, the Kingsley Tufts finalist Companion Grasses, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and National Book Award longlisted Doomstead Days. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he is an Associate Professor at University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
October 3, 2019
This poetry collection is a lament about the environmental state of our world. Written based on the author’s walks in the areas around his home, it includes many observations on the natural world and the damaged state of the environment. A powerful collection.
July 12, 2022
A beautiful collection on ecological consciousness. Teare’s poetry requires careful reading to understand but well worth the effort.
May 31, 2024
New favorite!!
July 13, 2020
This book explores the push and pull between the flesh of the body versus the flesh of the world. Teare writes strikingly about chemicals and toxins and their effect on biodiversity. His short lines are poignantly and musically written, and he seamlessly flows from topic to topic within a single poem. There is so much to be learned from this book; 10/10, highly recommend!
April 11, 2020
As spring arrives, it’s time to take inventory of what’s inside and outside ourselves. Doomstead Days counts the organic and foreign bodies as we are left to sit in the thawed earth and wish it well. Wish for life, wish for the health. A wonderful collection.
July 16, 2020
There are some tremendously poignant and inventive moments in this that marked me. I think the connectivity was attentive and creative. I appreciated the invested learning to interweave histories and biologies.
September 5, 2022
Radical, elegiac openness to the world
I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning
to the sea,
then turned right along
the surf
So A.R. Ammons begins “Corsons Inlet,” what many consider the quintessential poem of this mid-twentieth century prolific poet. Archie (the name he went by) was an inveterate walker. Masterful at capturing details, in his poems he named times, temperatures, plants, and animals. Though the childhood Christian faith into which he was indoctrinated would have him do so, his exposure to science when and after he served in the Navy (in a submarine) prevented his coming to any closure. As he concludes his signature poem,
…enjoying the freedom that
[an explanatory, grand] Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.
[Ammons, Collected Poems, 1, pp. 91-95]
Brian Teare is a creative sibling of Archie Ammons. Like Ammons, he walks. Like him, he writes poems reflecting on his peregrinations. While Ammons tended to write about his walks after arriving home, Teare portrays himself walking with a notebook into which he documents what he sees, hears, experiences. Several of the (all multi-page) poems in his 2019 Doomstead Days are, like many of Ammons’s, walks. Another important commonality is that both make extensive use of colons. The colon became Ammons’s preferred form of punctuation. Likewise Teare (in “Clear Water Renga” and “Toxics Release Inventory”) is enamored of the double colon. In both I sense the colons represent both a radical, all-encompassing inclusivity and a principled reluctance to draw any premature conclusions.
Teale is bold enough after the title of his long poem “Toxics Release Inventory” to include as a subtitle in parenthesis Essay on Man. Lo and behold, he does explicitly refer to Alexander Pope’s long poem. But instead of some God-ordained Chain of Being, Teare
…stand[s] & look[s]
at the white lily, the white
city, its surface
of commodities
an immense pretense :: beneath,
a thousand trade routes
run rough parallel
to thought & I follow them
out into the words
I touch through rhythm,
notebook open as I walk,
stride infecting script
[pp. 55-56]
Here is appreciation for nature. Here is also an understanding that “late empire” (p. 58) has irreparably damaged it. Citing Virginia Woolf and Rachel Carson in “Inventory,” and exploring in it as well as in other poems his own “queer”ness (see p. 90), he demonstrates the ways in which human domestication and exploitation of animals, plants, and minerals is truly perverse, in a way that nothing consenting adults do behind closed doors could be.
In sum, Doomstead Days is a deeply poignant and elegiac collection. It affirms my impulse to use colons in my own work, and to broaden my exploration of collective trauma,
from which we are not
exempted, our lives
a vast elaborate set
behind whose facade
the state hopes to hide
from public view the human
cost of war… [pp. 49-50]
I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning
to the sea,
then turned right along
the surf
So A.R. Ammons begins “Corsons Inlet,” what many consider the quintessential poem of this mid-twentieth century prolific poet. Archie (the name he went by) was an inveterate walker. Masterful at capturing details, in his poems he named times, temperatures, plants, and animals. Though the childhood Christian faith into which he was indoctrinated would have him do so, his exposure to science when and after he served in the Navy (in a submarine) prevented his coming to any closure. As he concludes his signature poem,
…enjoying the freedom that
[an explanatory, grand] Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.
[Ammons, Collected Poems, 1, pp. 91-95]
Brian Teare is a creative sibling of Archie Ammons. Like Ammons, he walks. Like him, he writes poems reflecting on his peregrinations. While Ammons tended to write about his walks after arriving home, Teare portrays himself walking with a notebook into which he documents what he sees, hears, experiences. Several of the (all multi-page) poems in his 2019 Doomstead Days are, like many of Ammons’s, walks. Another important commonality is that both make extensive use of colons. The colon became Ammons’s preferred form of punctuation. Likewise Teare (in “Clear Water Renga” and “Toxics Release Inventory”) is enamored of the double colon. In both I sense the colons represent both a radical, all-encompassing inclusivity and a principled reluctance to draw any premature conclusions.
Teale is bold enough after the title of his long poem “Toxics Release Inventory” to include as a subtitle in parenthesis Essay on Man. Lo and behold, he does explicitly refer to Alexander Pope’s long poem. But instead of some God-ordained Chain of Being, Teare
…stand[s] & look[s]
at the white lily, the white
city, its surface
of commodities
an immense pretense :: beneath,
a thousand trade routes
run rough parallel
to thought & I follow them
out into the words
I touch through rhythm,
notebook open as I walk,
stride infecting script
[pp. 55-56]
Here is appreciation for nature. Here is also an understanding that “late empire” (p. 58) has irreparably damaged it. Citing Virginia Woolf and Rachel Carson in “Inventory,” and exploring in it as well as in other poems his own “queer”ness (see p. 90), he demonstrates the ways in which human domestication and exploitation of animals, plants, and minerals is truly perverse, in a way that nothing consenting adults do behind closed doors could be.
In sum, Doomstead Days is a deeply poignant and elegiac collection. It affirms my impulse to use colons in my own work, and to broaden my exploration of collective trauma,
from which we are not
exempted, our lives
a vast elaborate set
behind whose facade
the state hopes to hide
from public view the human
cost of war… [pp. 49-50]
September 14, 2022
"I walk out as if to make peace with the city, its coercive hurt, to face the weird sure feeling of being alive [...]."
Read for an Ecopoetics class and greatly enjoyed. Definitely themes/structure that I would have missed had I not read it in an academic setting. Interesting questioning of the mind, the Real/Fact, and anthropocentrism.
Read for an Ecopoetics class and greatly enjoyed. Definitely themes/structure that I would have missed had I not read it in an academic setting. Interesting questioning of the mind, the Real/Fact, and anthropocentrism.
Read
November 8, 2019811.6 T2538d 2019
June 28, 2020
Lovely, poignant, melodic, wanting to be read and re-read out loud.
January 14, 2021
"today's gender is rain"
February 15, 2022
stunning
January 1, 2023
Poetry, and really amazing city-scape mixed with nature poetry at that.
January 17, 2023
Brilliant
April 2, 2025
Too tidy…too long.
December 30, 2021
just phenomenal
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews