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Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry
Black Nature is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated.Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry—anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild.
Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. This collection features major writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson as well as newer talents such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements.
Black Nature brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole.
A Friends Fund Publication.
Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. This collection features major writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson as well as newer talents such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements.
Black Nature brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole.
A Friends Fund Publication.
432 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
65 people are currently reading
2940 people want to read
About the author
Camille T. Dungy
28 books312 followersCamille T. Dungy (born in Denver in 1972) is an American poet and professor.
She is author of the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and three poetry collections, including, Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011) and Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010). Dungy is editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, 2009), co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea, 2009), and assistant editor of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006). Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Callaloo, The Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Poetry Daily.
Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Cave Canem, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and she is recipient of the 2011 American Book Award, a 2010 California Book Award silver medal, a two-time recipient of the Northern California Book Award, and a two-time NAACP Image Award nominee. Dungy graduated from Stanford University and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she earned her MFA. Recently a professor in the Creative Department at San Francisco State University (2011-2013), she is currently a Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.
She is author of the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and three poetry collections, including, Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011) and Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010). Dungy is editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (UGA, 2009), co-editor of From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea, 2009), and assistant editor of Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006). Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Callaloo, The Missouri Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Poetry Daily.
Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Cave Canem, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and she is recipient of the 2011 American Book Award, a 2010 California Book Award silver medal, a two-time recipient of the Northern California Book Award, and a two-time NAACP Image Award nominee. Dungy graduated from Stanford University and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where she earned her MFA. Recently a professor in the Creative Department at San Francisco State University (2011-2013), she is currently a Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 71 reviews
August 19, 2020
Love this book of poetry!💚💚
400 years of nature poetry by black poets organized NOT chronologically but in 10 "cycles" with titles such as "Nature, Be With Us," "Dirt On Our Hands," and "What The Land Remembers."
93 poets.
180 poems.
Too many favorites to list, but here is an excerpt from Kendra Hamilton's "Southern Living:"
Let us say the names together:
heart-leaf, barrenwort, rose campion, fairies thimbles.
Feel the meditative music of the names:
Goat’s rue, lady-by-the-gate, queen-of-the-meadow.
To love a garden is to be in love with words:
with potteries and racemes, corymbs hispid, and corms.
To love a garden is to be in love with possibility:
for it can never, almost by definition, ever be complete.
To love a garden is to be in love with contradiction:
ravished by order yet ever open to the wild.
But more than all these, to love a garden is to find
your one true lover: for a garden can’t survive its maker,
will die with the one who loved it, with only a sudden
spray of roses in June amid a derelict tangle of wood sorrel
and sumac to tell an eye that can read the land
that either of you was ever there.
400 years of nature poetry by black poets organized NOT chronologically but in 10 "cycles" with titles such as "Nature, Be With Us," "Dirt On Our Hands," and "What The Land Remembers."
93 poets.
180 poems.
Too many favorites to list, but here is an excerpt from Kendra Hamilton's "Southern Living:"
Let us say the names together:
heart-leaf, barrenwort, rose campion, fairies thimbles.
Feel the meditative music of the names:
Goat’s rue, lady-by-the-gate, queen-of-the-meadow.
To love a garden is to be in love with words:
with potteries and racemes, corymbs hispid, and corms.
To love a garden is to be in love with possibility:
for it can never, almost by definition, ever be complete.
To love a garden is to be in love with contradiction:
ravished by order yet ever open to the wild.
But more than all these, to love a garden is to find
your one true lover: for a garden can’t survive its maker,
will die with the one who loved it, with only a sudden
spray of roses in June amid a derelict tangle of wood sorrel
and sumac to tell an eye that can read the land
that either of you was ever there.
June 3, 2020
This book is so important, for so many reasons. I’ve been reading a poem two or three times each week with my daughter, who is thirteen and who often does not want to consider the harder realities of what it means to be a black female in the U.S. and in the world. Dungy’s curation of this collection encourages my daughter and me (her white ally) to view nature (and these writers’ experience of it) through a complex lens of pure celebration, joy, heartache, and pain. Here, nature can be comfort, it can be painful reminder, and it can be inspiration, often all at once. In a country that still expresses surprise to see black faces in natural spaces, this collection of poetry is utterly essential.
October 4, 2017
SO powerful and so important. I have stickies all over this book now.
September 30, 2013
An amazing collection of nature poetry by black poets, the earliest (as far as I can tell) being in heroic couplets by 18th century poet Phillis Wheatley. There is a brilliant introduction by the editor, outlining how black experience of nature, and thus black poetry about it, differs from the experiences and poetry of white Europeans and Americans. She then divides black approaches into 10 different groups, thus providing 10 short anthologies of similarly inspired poems. A truly eye-opening anthology, especially for someone like me, who was unaware of the majority of the poets collected here. The book comes with all the necessary apparatus: biographies of the poets, indexes of poets and titles, and separate brief introductions to each section.
May 8, 2013
An excellent collection of nature poems written by African Americans. Dungy's anthology is not what I expected from the title...I actually expected a collection of poems about the nature of blackness, not uncommon subject matter for much of the literature written by and about African Americans.
I merely rented this text for school, but I just purchased it from Amazon.com. I'm very grateful for Dungy's contribution to Black literature, we desperately needed it.
I merely rented this text for school, but I just purchased it from Amazon.com. I'm very grateful for Dungy's contribution to Black literature, we desperately needed it.
April 10, 2013
pick it up everyday. my most worn book.
September 28, 2012
I rarely, rarely give five stars to books that are not considered canonical or by living authors, but BLACK NATURE (ed. Camille T. Dungy, (UGA Press), IS already canonical, and even more spectacular than its predecessor, THE RINGING EAR: BLACK POETS LEAN SOUTH (ed. Nikky Finney, Cave Canem / UGA Press). The latter anthology was almost predictable, since most blacks and African-Americans have their roots in the South; but who would have thought to base an entire volume of poems of work that ranges from the Hopkinsian ecstatic--Kendra Hamilton, who gardens in a baptism of sweat and revels in her Spanish-moss-like hair in the mockingly titled “Southern Living,” which appears also in her 2006 début volume, THE GODDESS OF GUMBO (WordTech)--to the fear of Robert Johnson, as the rising sun began to sink down and so did he.
Others I originally alerted readers "to watch for" in the Finney volume who reappear here are Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, a 2010 NEA winner; Thomas Sayers Ellis, now nationally praised for SKIN, INC. (Graywolf); Harryette Mullen (RECYCLOPEDIA, Graywolf, 2006); and Hamilton, author as well of "The Search for the Perfect Sidecar" in a 2009 issue of CALLALOO, and now at work on a new manuscript MIRROURS OF THE WORLD: POEMS INSPIRED BY THE LIFE OF BELLE DA COSTA GREENE.)
Dungy herself, who has enjoyed the mentorship of Al Young, first came to my attention through the "rogue snnets" of WHAT TO EAT, WHAT TO DRINK, WHAT TO LEAVE FOR POISON (Red Hen) has gone on to publish two other splendid individual collections, SUCK ON THE MARROW (also Red Hen, winner of the Northern California Book Award, the American Book Award, as well as a NAACP Image Award nominee), and now the just-released SMITH BLUE (Southern Illinois Press and winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Prize).
Furthermore, Dungy, assistant editor for GATHERING GROUND, the first Cave Canem anthology, had her second book, SUCK ON THE MARROW, selected for the American Book Award, and her newest collection, SMITH BLUE, has finally arrived. That soaring eagle on the cover, grasped my heart in its talons--to change metaphoric strands--which I read the epigraphs and the first poem, all of which are concerned with the difficulty of maintaining balance between private emotion that struggles to express itself through our sullen craft and art and the horrors dished out to us daily--forgive, please, the change of metaphors once again--by "the world, the world, the world," to quote a "cousin on the light side," the late Lynda Hull. (Please see my review of THE ONLY WORLD here.)
There are many anthologies about nature poetry, of course, but Dungy’s stands out so shiningly that is has been endorsed by two giants of the genre in modern times, Allison Hawthorne Deming:
"What excites about this anthology is that it is not only the richest and most comprehensive collections by black poets I have read, it is the richest and most comprehensive collection of poems about nature I have read. I believe the book should be widely read, taught, and talked about."
and John Elder:
"BLACK NATURE is the most exciting anthology of poetry I’ve read in years. This collection will quickly become essential reading for poets and scholars, as well as for courses on American poetry and the literature of nature."
The praise is well-deserved: we’ve never had an assembly of poems that represents the conflict between a world traditionally represented, especially in the British and Irish canon, as benign, benevolent, and maternal and one that history has soaked in sweat, blood, tears, and terror.
And Dungy is well aware this is a cross-racial, but not necessarily cross-gender, predicament. Compare Plath, American but of German and Austrian origin, cringing as horizons surround her as though she were a witch ready for burning and Whitman, cradling hands full of grass and ecstatic in wonder. He claims he has no more fear of death than of being born: surely he needed to be held out a window and have “Ode to the Confederate Dead” recited to him, though perhaps “My Life--Had Stood--A Loaded Gun,” by the stone-American (so to speak) Dickinson would have gotten his attention. As I write in Part Four of a recent essay, “Down--But Not Out--In Mississippi and Elsewhere,” Dungy and I have shared an email giggle or three “about teaching what she calls some of Frost’s ‘totally gendered’ poems, such as ‘Acquainted with the Night’ or ‘Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening.’ Over the course of a decade in which I taught Plath-like overachieving eighteen-year-old women these poems in alternation, I’d habitually ask them to ponder whether or not a woman might have been its author. Though the immediate, shouted-out answer, varied slightly in choices of words, the essence was always the same: ‘No! Our mothers told us we would be raped and chopped into small pieces if we went out walking in the wood by ourselves at night.’ (Again, see Plath’s ‘Wuthering Heights.’)
“Tintern Abbey” cf. “Mont Blanc.” The Wordsworthian tradition itself is complicated when these two great works are set side by side. Seamus Heaney, who edited the Ecco Essentials volume on the former poet, also of rapturous Hopkins, for example, praises Plath for her relational view of nature in early poems such as “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” and “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor” but condemns her for poems he describes as negational. How can we account for perhaps the sole mis-step in Heaney’s canon as critic? First, of course, there’s his friendship with Ted Hughes, to whom he has dedicated at least one poem. More important, however, is that Wordsworthian vision in which nature is eternally kind, open, and ripe for harvest, if needing masculine protection. Heaney even perceives the Anglophone language--half Anglo-Saxon (“harsh” and “consonantal”), half Latinate (“tripping,” “lilting,” “assonantal,” meaning softer, more permeable vowels) in similar terms; but while I don’t know Gaelic except through poets‘ readings, I’d characterize its sounds as Lynda Hull did Polish: an “elaborate hush and murmur.” But there’s a problem Heaney doesn’t discuss, at least to my knowledge. While Gaelic has remained protected in designated areas, most in the Gaeltecht, or West Country, and thus untouched, three sets of invaders brought with them as many languages. The Vikings, then the Anglo-Saxons themselves, then the Norman French.
I’m no linguist. I’m a poet, thus I read with wide-open ears. But I think Dungy’s anthology has a thematic shown in its individual poems, both of which can be seen as a microcosm of Heaney’s argument for dueling elements in language, but here reflected in the differing relationship African-Americans and Blacks have had with nature itself.
Others I originally alerted readers "to watch for" in the Finney volume who reappear here are Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, a 2010 NEA winner; Thomas Sayers Ellis, now nationally praised for SKIN, INC. (Graywolf); Harryette Mullen (RECYCLOPEDIA, Graywolf, 2006); and Hamilton, author as well of "The Search for the Perfect Sidecar" in a 2009 issue of CALLALOO, and now at work on a new manuscript MIRROURS OF THE WORLD: POEMS INSPIRED BY THE LIFE OF BELLE DA COSTA GREENE.)
Dungy herself, who has enjoyed the mentorship of Al Young, first came to my attention through the "rogue snnets" of WHAT TO EAT, WHAT TO DRINK, WHAT TO LEAVE FOR POISON (Red Hen) has gone on to publish two other splendid individual collections, SUCK ON THE MARROW (also Red Hen, winner of the Northern California Book Award, the American Book Award, as well as a NAACP Image Award nominee), and now the just-released SMITH BLUE (Southern Illinois Press and winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Prize).
Furthermore, Dungy, assistant editor for GATHERING GROUND, the first Cave Canem anthology, had her second book, SUCK ON THE MARROW, selected for the American Book Award, and her newest collection, SMITH BLUE, has finally arrived. That soaring eagle on the cover, grasped my heart in its talons--to change metaphoric strands--which I read the epigraphs and the first poem, all of which are concerned with the difficulty of maintaining balance between private emotion that struggles to express itself through our sullen craft and art and the horrors dished out to us daily--forgive, please, the change of metaphors once again--by "the world, the world, the world," to quote a "cousin on the light side," the late Lynda Hull. (Please see my review of THE ONLY WORLD here.)
There are many anthologies about nature poetry, of course, but Dungy’s stands out so shiningly that is has been endorsed by two giants of the genre in modern times, Allison Hawthorne Deming:
"What excites about this anthology is that it is not only the richest and most comprehensive collections by black poets I have read, it is the richest and most comprehensive collection of poems about nature I have read. I believe the book should be widely read, taught, and talked about."
and John Elder:
"BLACK NATURE is the most exciting anthology of poetry I’ve read in years. This collection will quickly become essential reading for poets and scholars, as well as for courses on American poetry and the literature of nature."
The praise is well-deserved: we’ve never had an assembly of poems that represents the conflict between a world traditionally represented, especially in the British and Irish canon, as benign, benevolent, and maternal and one that history has soaked in sweat, blood, tears, and terror.
And Dungy is well aware this is a cross-racial, but not necessarily cross-gender, predicament. Compare Plath, American but of German and Austrian origin, cringing as horizons surround her as though she were a witch ready for burning and Whitman, cradling hands full of grass and ecstatic in wonder. He claims he has no more fear of death than of being born: surely he needed to be held out a window and have “Ode to the Confederate Dead” recited to him, though perhaps “My Life--Had Stood--A Loaded Gun,” by the stone-American (so to speak) Dickinson would have gotten his attention. As I write in Part Four of a recent essay, “Down--But Not Out--In Mississippi and Elsewhere,” Dungy and I have shared an email giggle or three “about teaching what she calls some of Frost’s ‘totally gendered’ poems, such as ‘Acquainted with the Night’ or ‘Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening.’ Over the course of a decade in which I taught Plath-like overachieving eighteen-year-old women these poems in alternation, I’d habitually ask them to ponder whether or not a woman might have been its author. Though the immediate, shouted-out answer, varied slightly in choices of words, the essence was always the same: ‘No! Our mothers told us we would be raped and chopped into small pieces if we went out walking in the wood by ourselves at night.’ (Again, see Plath’s ‘Wuthering Heights.’)
“Tintern Abbey” cf. “Mont Blanc.” The Wordsworthian tradition itself is complicated when these two great works are set side by side. Seamus Heaney, who edited the Ecco Essentials volume on the former poet, also of rapturous Hopkins, for example, praises Plath for her relational view of nature in early poems such as “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” and “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor” but condemns her for poems he describes as negational. How can we account for perhaps the sole mis-step in Heaney’s canon as critic? First, of course, there’s his friendship with Ted Hughes, to whom he has dedicated at least one poem. More important, however, is that Wordsworthian vision in which nature is eternally kind, open, and ripe for harvest, if needing masculine protection. Heaney even perceives the Anglophone language--half Anglo-Saxon (“harsh” and “consonantal”), half Latinate (“tripping,” “lilting,” “assonantal,” meaning softer, more permeable vowels) in similar terms; but while I don’t know Gaelic except through poets‘ readings, I’d characterize its sounds as Lynda Hull did Polish: an “elaborate hush and murmur.” But there’s a problem Heaney doesn’t discuss, at least to my knowledge. While Gaelic has remained protected in designated areas, most in the Gaeltecht, or West Country, and thus untouched, three sets of invaders brought with them as many languages. The Vikings, then the Anglo-Saxons themselves, then the Norman French.
I’m no linguist. I’m a poet, thus I read with wide-open ears. But I think Dungy’s anthology has a thematic shown in its individual poems, both of which can be seen as a microcosm of Heaney’s argument for dueling elements in language, but here reflected in the differing relationship African-Americans and Blacks have had with nature itself.
January 2, 2020
Worth reading cover to cover
January 20, 2022
A lush anthology just teeming with riches. I loved the editing and organization as well—the sections and essays which opened them were excellent and complemented the poems while also adding something of their own.
May 31, 2021
180 poems from 93 poets past and present. Really amazing words and worlds and metaphors and grit, that dedication and strength that has brought Black people through centuries of shameful racism. Camille Dungy was in another anthology of women poets and I am devouring anything she is in involved in, and this was another treasure that should be required reading. As someone so in love with nature, I did not even understand until recently how persons of color have felt in and about the outdoors, and their reception has been as in many arenas, shameful and racist, and my heart breaks that this still is happening. I am also reading Dr. Drew Latham, an ornithologist and eco-addict, a memoir and a book of poems of his, and I just let my heart break open as it is meant to do, and will do the work I need to do with my privilege.
Dungy writes, “the natural world, aligned with or opposition to the human world, mediates the poems that reveal histories stored in various natural bodies.” And now my mind and body will pass them on.
Surely i am able to write poems
Celebrating grass and how the blue
In the sky can glow green or red
And the waters lean against the
Chesapeake shore like a familiar
Poems about nature and landscape
Surely. But whenever i begin
“The trees wave their knotted branches
And...”. Why
Is there under that poems always
An other poem?
Lucille Clifton
____
[earth i thank you]
Earth, I thank you
For the pleasure of your language
You’ve had a hard time
Bringing it to me
From the ground
To all the way
Feeling Seeing. Smelling. Touching
-awareness
I am here!
Anne Spencer, 1901-1974
____
What to Eat, What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison
Only now, in spring, can the place be named:
Tulip poplar, daffodil, crab apple,
Dogwood, budding pink-green, white-green, yellow
On my knowing. All winter i was lost.
Fall, i found myself here, with no texture
My fingers know. Then, worse, the white longing
That downed us deep three months. No flower heat.
That was winter. But now, in spring, the buds
Flock our trees. Ten million exquisite buds,
Tiny and loud, flaring their petalled wings,
Bellowing from ashen branches vibrant
Keys, the chords of spring’s triumph.: fisted heart,
Dogwood; grail, poplar; wine spray, crab apple.
The song is drink, is color. Come. Now. Taste.
...
The song is drink, is color. Come now, taste
What the world has to offer. When you eat,
You will know that music comes in guises-
Bold of crape myrtle, sweet of daffodil-
Beyond sound, guises they never told you
Could be true. And they aren’t. Except they are
So real now, this spring, you know them, taste them.
Green as kale, the songs of spring, bright as wine,
The music. Faces of this season grin
With clobbering wantonness- see the smiles
Open on each branch?- until you, too, smile.
Wide carnival of color...
...
Glee is the body of the daffodil
Reaching tubed fingers through the day, feeling
Her own trumpeted passion choiring air
With hot, colored song. This is texture
I love. This life. And, too, you love me,
Inhale my whole being every spring. Gone
Winter, heavy clod whose icy body
Fell into my bed. I must leave you, but
I’ll wait through heat, fall, freeze, to hear you cry:
Daffodils are up, My God, what beauty!
Daffodils are up, My God! What beauty
Concerted down on us last night. And if
I sleep again, I’ll wake to a louder
Blossoming, the symphony smashing down
Hothouse walls, and into the world: music.
...
The song, the color, the rising ecstasy
Of spring. My God. This beauty. This, this
Is what I’ve hoped for. All my life is here
In the untamed core-dogwood, daffodil,
Tulip poplar, crane apple, crape myrtle-
Only now, in spring, can the place be named.
Camille T. Dungy
____
Spring Dawn
There comes to my heart from regions remote
A wild desire for the hedge and the brush
Whenever I hear the first wild note
Of the meadow lark and the hermit thrush.
The broken and upturned earth to the air,
But a million the thrusting blades of Spring,
sends out from the sod and everywhere
Its pungent aromas over everything.
Then’s Oh, for the hills , the dawn, and the dew,
The breath of the fields and the silent lake,
And watching the wings of light burst through
The scarlet blush of the new daybreak.
It is then when the earth still nestles in sleep,
And the robes of light are scarce unfurled,
You can almost feel, in its mighty sweep
The onward rush and roll of the world.
George Marion McClellan, 1860-1934
___
The Mountains of California
These demonstrations of one God,
Green in the springtime in wintertime too
And all the time John Muir was out here
Living with them,
Breaking himself on them,
I just ride amongst them in a car,
Flip the radio off out of respect
And out of the feeling that there
More important waves
Floating in and out of us, mostly thru us
The mountains of California,
Do i have to say anything?
I love all this evidence
Set up to surround me this way,
Mountain, ocean, you just name it.
Al Young
____
Deep in the Quiet Wood
Are you bowed down in heart?
Do you hear the clashing discords and the din of life?
Then come away, come to the peaceful wood.
Here bathe your soul in silence. Listen! Now,
From out of the palpitating solitude
Do you not catch, yet faint, exclusive strains?
They are above, around, within you, everywhere.
Silently listen! Clear, and still more clear, they come.
They bubble up in rippling notes, and swell in singing tones.
Now let your soul run the whole gamut of the wondrous scales,
Until, responsive to the tonic chord,
It touches God’s grand cathedral organ,
Filling earth for you with heavenly peace
And holy harmonies.
James Weldon Johnson 1871-1938
___
Metamorphism
Is this the sea?
This lisping, lulling murmur of soft waters
Kissing a white beached shore with tremulous lips;
Blue rivulets of sky gurgling deliciously
O’er pale smooth-stones
This too?
The sudden birth of unrestrained splendor,
Tugging with turbulent force at Neptune’s leash;
This passionate abandon,
This strange tempestuous soliloquy of Nature,
All these- the sea?
Helene Johnson
___
Fearless
Good to see the green world
I discouraged, the green fire
Bounding back every spring, and beyond
The tyranny of thumbs, the weeds
And other co-conspiring green genes
Ganging up, breaking in....
Not there, and then there-
Naked, unhumble unrequitedly green-
Growing as they would be trees
On any unmanned patch of earth,
Any sidewalk cracked, crooning
Between ties on lonesome rail road tracks.
And moss, the shyest green citizen
Anywhere, tiptoeing the trunk
In the damp shade of a an oak.
Is it possible To be so glad?
The shoots rising in spite of every plot
Against them. Every chemical stupidity,
Every burned field, every better
Home and garden finally overrun
By the green will, the green greenness
Of green things growing every greener.
The mad earth publishing
Her many million murmuring
unsaids. Look
How the shade pours
from the big branches- the ground,
The good ground, solid
and sweet. The trees-who
Are they? Their stillness, that
Long silence, the never
Running away.
Tim Seibles, 2012
___
To waste at trees
Black men building a Nation,
My Brother said, have no leisure like them
No right to waste at trees
Inventing names for wrens and weeds.
But it’s when you don’t care about the world
That you begin opening and destroying it
Like them.
And how can you build
Especially a Nation
Without a soul?
He forgot that we’ve built one already-
In the cane, in the rice and cotton fields
And unlike them, came out humanly whole
Because out fathers, being African,
Saw the sun and the moon as God’s right and left eye,
Named him Rain Maker and welcomed the blessings of his spit,
Found int he rocks his stoney footprints,
Heard him traveling the sky on the wind
And speaking in the thunder
That would trumpet in the soul of the slave.
Forget this and let them make us deceive ourselves
That seasons have no meaning for us
And like them
We are slaves again.
Gerald Barrax, Sr.
____
Southern Living
I am cut and bruised, my nails broken.
I have found love and my lover is ungentle.
There is a many-hued bruise beside my left knee,
Three on my right leg at the ankle and thigh,
And I fear I grow obsessed, neglect my looks-
My hair grows wild. This is what is like to love in middle life
And I praise God that She has blessed me
With a love like this before i die.
I lavish this passion on my house and garden.
I have never felt this for any man. To walk
Through my own picket fence, to climb
My steps and survey...the painted ferns,
Azaleas and lilacs, every precious glimpse
Of green and the meditative music
Of the names...
To love a garden is to be in love with words:
With potageries and racemes, coryms...
To love a garden is to be love with possibility:
For it can never, almost by definition, ever be complete.
To love a garden is to be in love with contradiction:
Ravished by order but open to the wild.
Kendra Hamilton
____
Earth Song
It’s an earth song-
And I’ve been waiting long
For an earth song.
It’s a spring song!
I’ve been waiting long
For a spring song:
Strong as the bursting of young buds
Strong as the shoots of a new plant...
An earth song!
A body song!
A spring song!
And I’ve been waiting long
For an earth song.
Langston Hughes
*****************
Language
Silence is one part of speech, the war cry
Of wind down a mountain pass another.
A stranger’s voice echoing through lonely valleys,
These are the keys to cipher,
The way the high hawk’s key unlocks the throat
Of the sky and the coyote’s yip knocks
it shut, the way the aspen’s bells conform
To the breeze while the rapid’s drums defines
resistance. Sage speaks with one voice, pinyon
With another. Rock, wind her hand, water
Her brush, spells and then scatters her demands.
Some notes tear and pebble our paths. Some notes
Gather; the bank we map our lives around.
Camille T. Dungy
___
San Francisco, Spring 1986
I feel so East Coast. Shut down, frantic.
Too used to the expensive, the hot-house flowers sold on
Every corner. Here the flowers brighten every corner. Free.
Here the wildflowers are different. Calla lilies grown wild?
Silky, white, trumpet-shaped, composed.
...
And who can be blind to the city’s beauty?
Where century old eucalyptus rend
Cathedrals before stone and the sun’s lush glow
Halos the rise and fall of exhausted hills.
Patricia Spears Jones
___
February Leaving
There was a thick summer.
There were cicadas and rows of grave markers,
Mothers knitting and grandmothers
Weaving their fading thoughts into combs of silver hair.,
Lightning bugs lost and flagging the woods,
Homes that whispered to each other at midnight
The truth from their cellars.
I could say none of this lives in us.
...
I could tell you that the grass sorrows
If there is no thunder or the earth shudders
Where people sleep or the mountains mouth
Their wishes silently into snow.
...
What do you say with memory-
That the continents long for each other
Just as children who are bundled ghosts
Leave their voices as trails in the woods,
That lakes are burdened with notions of ice
And heaviness, just like us.
I will say only that the things we trust are less
And less true in winter.
Ruth Ellen Kocher
___
Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be
The way the universe sat waiting to become,
Quietly, in the nether of space and time,
You too remain in some cellular snuggle...
For now, let me tell you about the bush called the honeysuckle
That the sad call a weed, and how you could push you little
Sun-licked face into the throngs and breathe and breathe.
Sweetness would be your name, and you would wonder why
Four of your teeth are so sharp, and the tiny mountain range
Of your knuckles are so hard...and everything,
Everything on this this earth, little dreamer, little dreamer
Of the new world, holy, every rain drop and sand grain and blade
Of grass worthy of gasp and joy and love, tiny shaman.
Tiny blood thrust, tinny trillion cells trilling and trilling,
Little dreamer, little hard hat, little heartbeat,
Little best of me.
Ross Gay
____
In the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge, thinking of Rachel Carson
The elements raveling and unraveling;
Groundwater misting into rain, falling
Back into groundwater; salt water wash
Through brackish freshwater bordering
Sea...the rush and bubble
Of the tidal river winding thought low tide...
The path between firm ground and marsh.
The first time down the path leads
To enlightenment, the second, to wonder;
The third finds us silent, listening
To the few gulls lift and caw as we watch
The wind, which makes itself known
Ink the sea grass and as it dimples the water...
Anthony Walton
___
Down from the Houses of Magic
...listen:
All the prayer-wheels of april-into-May luster
Spinning God-drunk-till finally beside
The moon-daft willow, the frenzy of scotch broom,
The fleet-souled Orioles marshal, at wolf’s hour,
Then sally in one brilliant will.
Abundance begins here- at the sea lip:
On the Cape, I’ve come to God and Proteus, come to rest in wild places,
Whisker-still galaxies of marshlands.,
Beaches where I pause and study
The Atlantic, teal and taciturn, the Atlantic, glittering and fluent.
Bluefish wake to the breathless dream of land...
And now, clear and fugitive, in jack-in-the-box brilliance,
The baby whale blooms:
Wild world, wild messenger- you are the moment’s crown, sea-love.
...
Midsummer.
And after belligerent sun, twilight brings
A muezzin of sea-wind,
And the soul of the garden bows,
a praise in the earth:
Among lilies, suddenly,
In the willow’s cool hair,
The breath of God...
One day on Gull Hill I wept and prayed:
Let this earth become a heaven...
And a voice sang,:
Here are the flowers of deep suffering
Swaying in the heart of God.
Because
Each of us must seek
A finer life, a finer death.
My soul still singing,
Adamant to live:
The history of survival is written under my lids.
And if the husk of the world was ripped away,
We will not have altered the consciousness of one leaf-
Let this earth become a heaven-
Form the point of life within the mind of God...
Cyrus Cassells
___
You must walk this lonesome
say hello to moon
leads you into trees as thick as folk on Easter pews dark
But venture through amazing
was blind but now fireflies glittering dangling
From evergreens like Christmas oracles
soon you meet the riverbank down
By the riverside water bapteases your feet
...
What never saw inside a peace
Be still
Mix in your tears
Moon distills distress like yours
So nobody knows the trouble it causes
Pull up a log and sit until your empty is full
...
Draw from the river like it is a well with my soul
O moon you croon
And home you go.
Eve Shockley
__
Ruellia Noctiflora
...he said, gesturing,
His tan eyes a blazing,
That last night,
Walking in the full moon light,
He’d stumbled on
A very rare specimen:
Ruellia noctiflora,
The night blooming wild petunia.
Said he suddenly sensed a fragrance
And a small white glistening.
It was clearly a petunia...
If we hurried, I could see it
Before it closed to contemplate
Becoming seed.
Hand in hand, we entered
The light-spattered morning-dark woods.
Where he pointed was only a white flower
Until I saw him seeing it.
Marilyn Nelson
____
Evening Primrose
Neither rosy nor prim,
Not cousin to the cowslip
Nor the extravagant fuchsia-
I doubt anyone has ever
Picked one for show,
Though the woods must be fringed
With their lemony effusions.
Sun blathers its baronial
endorsement, but they refuse
to join the ranks. Summer
brings them in armfuls,
yet, when the day is large,
you won’t see them fluttering
the length of the road.
They’ll wait until the world’s
tucked in and the sky’s
one ceaseless shimmer-then
lift their saturated eyelids
and blaze, blaze
all night long
for no one.
Rita Dove
___
The Night Blooming Cereus
And so for nights
We waited, hoping to see
the heavy bud
break into flower...
We agreed we ought
To celebrate the blossom,
Paint ourselves, dance
In honor of
Archaic mysteries
When it appeared. Meanwhile,
We waited...
The belling of
tropic perfume-that
signaling
not meant for us;
The darkness
cloying with summoning
fragrance. We dropped
trivial tasks
and marveling
beheld at last the achieved
flower. It’s moonlight
petals were
Still unfold-
In, the spike fringe of the outer
Perianth recessing
as we watched.
Lunar presence,
foredoomed, already dying,
It charged the room
with plangency
older than human
cries, ancient as prayers
involving Osiris, Krishna,
Tezcatlipoca.
We spoke
In whispers when
We spoke
At all...
Robert Haydn
___
Sweet Enough Ocean, Cotton
I haven’t seen the sea before
But it must be easy to love
Because without ever seeing it before
I call the blow-open cotton a sea,
I call moving through the rows
My attempt to walk on rough water.
It’s not that cotton seems watery
Or that each cotton seed hair is like
A separate one of the sparkles the sun makes
When its light bounces on moving water,
-though it is like that
Now that i think about it.
It’s just how big
the cotton is. This small field
Seems bigger than the sky,
and is the sky for ants. It’s just
How the cotton carries you,
Delivers you on a rocky shore,
Shipwrecks you.
Strands you
Thylias Moss
___
Be careful
i must be careful about such things as these.
The thin-grained oak. The quiet grizzlies scared
Into the hills by the constant tracks squeezing
In behind them closer in the snow...
I must be careful not to shake
Anything in too wild an elation. Not to jar
The fragile mountains tags into the paper far-
Ness. Nor avalanche the fog or the eagle from the air.
Of the gentle wilderness i must set the precarious
Words, like rocks. Without one snowcapped mistake
Ed Roberson
Dungy writes, “the natural world, aligned with or opposition to the human world, mediates the poems that reveal histories stored in various natural bodies.” And now my mind and body will pass them on.
Surely i am able to write poems
Celebrating grass and how the blue
In the sky can glow green or red
And the waters lean against the
Chesapeake shore like a familiar
Poems about nature and landscape
Surely. But whenever i begin
“The trees wave their knotted branches
And...”. Why
Is there under that poems always
An other poem?
Lucille Clifton
____
[earth i thank you]
Earth, I thank you
For the pleasure of your language
You’ve had a hard time
Bringing it to me
From the ground
To all the way
Feeling Seeing. Smelling. Touching
-awareness
I am here!
Anne Spencer, 1901-1974
____
What to Eat, What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison
Only now, in spring, can the place be named:
Tulip poplar, daffodil, crab apple,
Dogwood, budding pink-green, white-green, yellow
On my knowing. All winter i was lost.
Fall, i found myself here, with no texture
My fingers know. Then, worse, the white longing
That downed us deep three months. No flower heat.
That was winter. But now, in spring, the buds
Flock our trees. Ten million exquisite buds,
Tiny and loud, flaring their petalled wings,
Bellowing from ashen branches vibrant
Keys, the chords of spring’s triumph.: fisted heart,
Dogwood; grail, poplar; wine spray, crab apple.
The song is drink, is color. Come. Now. Taste.
...
The song is drink, is color. Come now, taste
What the world has to offer. When you eat,
You will know that music comes in guises-
Bold of crape myrtle, sweet of daffodil-
Beyond sound, guises they never told you
Could be true. And they aren’t. Except they are
So real now, this spring, you know them, taste them.
Green as kale, the songs of spring, bright as wine,
The music. Faces of this season grin
With clobbering wantonness- see the smiles
Open on each branch?- until you, too, smile.
Wide carnival of color...
...
Glee is the body of the daffodil
Reaching tubed fingers through the day, feeling
Her own trumpeted passion choiring air
With hot, colored song. This is texture
I love. This life. And, too, you love me,
Inhale my whole being every spring. Gone
Winter, heavy clod whose icy body
Fell into my bed. I must leave you, but
I’ll wait through heat, fall, freeze, to hear you cry:
Daffodils are up, My God, what beauty!
Daffodils are up, My God! What beauty
Concerted down on us last night. And if
I sleep again, I’ll wake to a louder
Blossoming, the symphony smashing down
Hothouse walls, and into the world: music.
...
The song, the color, the rising ecstasy
Of spring. My God. This beauty. This, this
Is what I’ve hoped for. All my life is here
In the untamed core-dogwood, daffodil,
Tulip poplar, crane apple, crape myrtle-
Only now, in spring, can the place be named.
Camille T. Dungy
____
Spring Dawn
There comes to my heart from regions remote
A wild desire for the hedge and the brush
Whenever I hear the first wild note
Of the meadow lark and the hermit thrush.
The broken and upturned earth to the air,
But a million the thrusting blades of Spring,
sends out from the sod and everywhere
Its pungent aromas over everything.
Then’s Oh, for the hills , the dawn, and the dew,
The breath of the fields and the silent lake,
And watching the wings of light burst through
The scarlet blush of the new daybreak.
It is then when the earth still nestles in sleep,
And the robes of light are scarce unfurled,
You can almost feel, in its mighty sweep
The onward rush and roll of the world.
George Marion McClellan, 1860-1934
___
The Mountains of California
These demonstrations of one God,
Green in the springtime in wintertime too
And all the time John Muir was out here
Living with them,
Breaking himself on them,
I just ride amongst them in a car,
Flip the radio off out of respect
And out of the feeling that there
More important waves
Floating in and out of us, mostly thru us
The mountains of California,
Do i have to say anything?
I love all this evidence
Set up to surround me this way,
Mountain, ocean, you just name it.
Al Young
____
Deep in the Quiet Wood
Are you bowed down in heart?
Do you hear the clashing discords and the din of life?
Then come away, come to the peaceful wood.
Here bathe your soul in silence. Listen! Now,
From out of the palpitating solitude
Do you not catch, yet faint, exclusive strains?
They are above, around, within you, everywhere.
Silently listen! Clear, and still more clear, they come.
They bubble up in rippling notes, and swell in singing tones.
Now let your soul run the whole gamut of the wondrous scales,
Until, responsive to the tonic chord,
It touches God’s grand cathedral organ,
Filling earth for you with heavenly peace
And holy harmonies.
James Weldon Johnson 1871-1938
___
Metamorphism
Is this the sea?
This lisping, lulling murmur of soft waters
Kissing a white beached shore with tremulous lips;
Blue rivulets of sky gurgling deliciously
O’er pale smooth-stones
This too?
The sudden birth of unrestrained splendor,
Tugging with turbulent force at Neptune’s leash;
This passionate abandon,
This strange tempestuous soliloquy of Nature,
All these- the sea?
Helene Johnson
___
Fearless
Good to see the green world
I discouraged, the green fire
Bounding back every spring, and beyond
The tyranny of thumbs, the weeds
And other co-conspiring green genes
Ganging up, breaking in....
Not there, and then there-
Naked, unhumble unrequitedly green-
Growing as they would be trees
On any unmanned patch of earth,
Any sidewalk cracked, crooning
Between ties on lonesome rail road tracks.
And moss, the shyest green citizen
Anywhere, tiptoeing the trunk
In the damp shade of a an oak.
Is it possible To be so glad?
The shoots rising in spite of every plot
Against them. Every chemical stupidity,
Every burned field, every better
Home and garden finally overrun
By the green will, the green greenness
Of green things growing every greener.
The mad earth publishing
Her many million murmuring
unsaids. Look
How the shade pours
from the big branches- the ground,
The good ground, solid
and sweet. The trees-who
Are they? Their stillness, that
Long silence, the never
Running away.
Tim Seibles, 2012
___
To waste at trees
Black men building a Nation,
My Brother said, have no leisure like them
No right to waste at trees
Inventing names for wrens and weeds.
But it’s when you don’t care about the world
That you begin opening and destroying it
Like them.
And how can you build
Especially a Nation
Without a soul?
He forgot that we’ve built one already-
In the cane, in the rice and cotton fields
And unlike them, came out humanly whole
Because out fathers, being African,
Saw the sun and the moon as God’s right and left eye,
Named him Rain Maker and welcomed the blessings of his spit,
Found int he rocks his stoney footprints,
Heard him traveling the sky on the wind
And speaking in the thunder
That would trumpet in the soul of the slave.
Forget this and let them make us deceive ourselves
That seasons have no meaning for us
And like them
We are slaves again.
Gerald Barrax, Sr.
____
Southern Living
I am cut and bruised, my nails broken.
I have found love and my lover is ungentle.
There is a many-hued bruise beside my left knee,
Three on my right leg at the ankle and thigh,
And I fear I grow obsessed, neglect my looks-
My hair grows wild. This is what is like to love in middle life
And I praise God that She has blessed me
With a love like this before i die.
I lavish this passion on my house and garden.
I have never felt this for any man. To walk
Through my own picket fence, to climb
My steps and survey...the painted ferns,
Azaleas and lilacs, every precious glimpse
Of green and the meditative music
Of the names...
To love a garden is to be in love with words:
With potageries and racemes, coryms...
To love a garden is to be love with possibility:
For it can never, almost by definition, ever be complete.
To love a garden is to be in love with contradiction:
Ravished by order but open to the wild.
Kendra Hamilton
____
Earth Song
It’s an earth song-
And I’ve been waiting long
For an earth song.
It’s a spring song!
I’ve been waiting long
For a spring song:
Strong as the bursting of young buds
Strong as the shoots of a new plant...
An earth song!
A body song!
A spring song!
And I’ve been waiting long
For an earth song.
Langston Hughes
*****************
Language
Silence is one part of speech, the war cry
Of wind down a mountain pass another.
A stranger’s voice echoing through lonely valleys,
These are the keys to cipher,
The way the high hawk’s key unlocks the throat
Of the sky and the coyote’s yip knocks
it shut, the way the aspen’s bells conform
To the breeze while the rapid’s drums defines
resistance. Sage speaks with one voice, pinyon
With another. Rock, wind her hand, water
Her brush, spells and then scatters her demands.
Some notes tear and pebble our paths. Some notes
Gather; the bank we map our lives around.
Camille T. Dungy
___
San Francisco, Spring 1986
I feel so East Coast. Shut down, frantic.
Too used to the expensive, the hot-house flowers sold on
Every corner. Here the flowers brighten every corner. Free.
Here the wildflowers are different. Calla lilies grown wild?
Silky, white, trumpet-shaped, composed.
...
And who can be blind to the city’s beauty?
Where century old eucalyptus rend
Cathedrals before stone and the sun’s lush glow
Halos the rise and fall of exhausted hills.
Patricia Spears Jones
___
February Leaving
There was a thick summer.
There were cicadas and rows of grave markers,
Mothers knitting and grandmothers
Weaving their fading thoughts into combs of silver hair.,
Lightning bugs lost and flagging the woods,
Homes that whispered to each other at midnight
The truth from their cellars.
I could say none of this lives in us.
...
I could tell you that the grass sorrows
If there is no thunder or the earth shudders
Where people sleep or the mountains mouth
Their wishes silently into snow.
...
What do you say with memory-
That the continents long for each other
Just as children who are bundled ghosts
Leave their voices as trails in the woods,
That lakes are burdened with notions of ice
And heaviness, just like us.
I will say only that the things we trust are less
And less true in winter.
Ruth Ellen Kocher
___
Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be
The way the universe sat waiting to become,
Quietly, in the nether of space and time,
You too remain in some cellular snuggle...
For now, let me tell you about the bush called the honeysuckle
That the sad call a weed, and how you could push you little
Sun-licked face into the throngs and breathe and breathe.
Sweetness would be your name, and you would wonder why
Four of your teeth are so sharp, and the tiny mountain range
Of your knuckles are so hard...and everything,
Everything on this this earth, little dreamer, little dreamer
Of the new world, holy, every rain drop and sand grain and blade
Of grass worthy of gasp and joy and love, tiny shaman.
Tiny blood thrust, tinny trillion cells trilling and trilling,
Little dreamer, little hard hat, little heartbeat,
Little best of me.
Ross Gay
____
In the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge, thinking of Rachel Carson
The elements raveling and unraveling;
Groundwater misting into rain, falling
Back into groundwater; salt water wash
Through brackish freshwater bordering
Sea...the rush and bubble
Of the tidal river winding thought low tide...
The path between firm ground and marsh.
The first time down the path leads
To enlightenment, the second, to wonder;
The third finds us silent, listening
To the few gulls lift and caw as we watch
The wind, which makes itself known
Ink the sea grass and as it dimples the water...
Anthony Walton
___
Down from the Houses of Magic
...listen:
All the prayer-wheels of april-into-May luster
Spinning God-drunk-till finally beside
The moon-daft willow, the frenzy of scotch broom,
The fleet-souled Orioles marshal, at wolf’s hour,
Then sally in one brilliant will.
Abundance begins here- at the sea lip:
On the Cape, I’ve come to God and Proteus, come to rest in wild places,
Whisker-still galaxies of marshlands.,
Beaches where I pause and study
The Atlantic, teal and taciturn, the Atlantic, glittering and fluent.
Bluefish wake to the breathless dream of land...
And now, clear and fugitive, in jack-in-the-box brilliance,
The baby whale blooms:
Wild world, wild messenger- you are the moment’s crown, sea-love.
...
Midsummer.
And after belligerent sun, twilight brings
A muezzin of sea-wind,
And the soul of the garden bows,
a praise in the earth:
Among lilies, suddenly,
In the willow’s cool hair,
The breath of God...
One day on Gull Hill I wept and prayed:
Let this earth become a heaven...
And a voice sang,:
Here are the flowers of deep suffering
Swaying in the heart of God.
Because
Each of us must seek
A finer life, a finer death.
My soul still singing,
Adamant to live:
The history of survival is written under my lids.
And if the husk of the world was ripped away,
We will not have altered the consciousness of one leaf-
Let this earth become a heaven-
Form the point of life within the mind of God...
Cyrus Cassells
___
You must walk this lonesome
say hello to moon
leads you into trees as thick as folk on Easter pews dark
But venture through amazing
was blind but now fireflies glittering dangling
From evergreens like Christmas oracles
soon you meet the riverbank down
By the riverside water bapteases your feet
...
What never saw inside a peace
Be still
Mix in your tears
Moon distills distress like yours
So nobody knows the trouble it causes
Pull up a log and sit until your empty is full
...
Draw from the river like it is a well with my soul
O moon you croon
And home you go.
Eve Shockley
__
Ruellia Noctiflora
...he said, gesturing,
His tan eyes a blazing,
That last night,
Walking in the full moon light,
He’d stumbled on
A very rare specimen:
Ruellia noctiflora,
The night blooming wild petunia.
Said he suddenly sensed a fragrance
And a small white glistening.
It was clearly a petunia...
If we hurried, I could see it
Before it closed to contemplate
Becoming seed.
Hand in hand, we entered
The light-spattered morning-dark woods.
Where he pointed was only a white flower
Until I saw him seeing it.
Marilyn Nelson
____
Evening Primrose
Neither rosy nor prim,
Not cousin to the cowslip
Nor the extravagant fuchsia-
I doubt anyone has ever
Picked one for show,
Though the woods must be fringed
With their lemony effusions.
Sun blathers its baronial
endorsement, but they refuse
to join the ranks. Summer
brings them in armfuls,
yet, when the day is large,
you won’t see them fluttering
the length of the road.
They’ll wait until the world’s
tucked in and the sky’s
one ceaseless shimmer-then
lift their saturated eyelids
and blaze, blaze
all night long
for no one.
Rita Dove
___
The Night Blooming Cereus
And so for nights
We waited, hoping to see
the heavy bud
break into flower...
We agreed we ought
To celebrate the blossom,
Paint ourselves, dance
In honor of
Archaic mysteries
When it appeared. Meanwhile,
We waited...
The belling of
tropic perfume-that
signaling
not meant for us;
The darkness
cloying with summoning
fragrance. We dropped
trivial tasks
and marveling
beheld at last the achieved
flower. It’s moonlight
petals were
Still unfold-
In, the spike fringe of the outer
Perianth recessing
as we watched.
Lunar presence,
foredoomed, already dying,
It charged the room
with plangency
older than human
cries, ancient as prayers
involving Osiris, Krishna,
Tezcatlipoca.
We spoke
In whispers when
We spoke
At all...
Robert Haydn
___
Sweet Enough Ocean, Cotton
I haven’t seen the sea before
But it must be easy to love
Because without ever seeing it before
I call the blow-open cotton a sea,
I call moving through the rows
My attempt to walk on rough water.
It’s not that cotton seems watery
Or that each cotton seed hair is like
A separate one of the sparkles the sun makes
When its light bounces on moving water,
-though it is like that
Now that i think about it.
It’s just how big
the cotton is. This small field
Seems bigger than the sky,
and is the sky for ants. It’s just
How the cotton carries you,
Delivers you on a rocky shore,
Shipwrecks you.
Strands you
Thylias Moss
___
Be careful
i must be careful about such things as these.
The thin-grained oak. The quiet grizzlies scared
Into the hills by the constant tracks squeezing
In behind them closer in the snow...
I must be careful not to shake
Anything in too wild an elation. Not to jar
The fragile mountains tags into the paper far-
Ness. Nor avalanche the fog or the eagle from the air.
Of the gentle wilderness i must set the precarious
Words, like rocks. Without one snowcapped mistake
Ed Roberson
August 3, 2020
Literature anthologies tend to snoozily suck the sap outta poetry's booze. Not this one. Editor Camille T. Dungy has her genius powers turned on when selecting/arranging these 250 years of African American nature poems.
One reason this book pulses and doesn't flatline is Dungy didn't chronologically order it. Brilliant decision! The poems instead are organized into 10 sections, each one introduced by a short prose piece by a featured poet. So you're not crawling from way back when slowly, ever so slowly, to now. (Yawn.) You're immersed in Black ecopoetic visions, a simultaneity of them zigzagging all over time. And why not have Phillis Wheatley of 1770 followed by Nikki Giovanni of 1970? If they're singing concordantly let's hear them together on stage.
The poets featured are from all over the map. I was introduced to so many writers. Yeah, I'm ignorant, just more aware of it. Book 1 opens with Ed Roberson then Lucille Clifton, just two of the phenomenal writers I came to love through this book. There's 93 poets featured, 180 poems, so you see many more than once, and a handful 4-5 times. GE Patterson, June Jordan, Yusef Komunyakaa, Robert Hayden, Gerald Barrax, Sr., Camille T. Dungy, Major Jackson, Alice Walker, Natasha Trethewey, Phillis Wheatley and Amaud Jamaul Johnson are some of the poets I loved in here, their painfilled at times sublime nature.
I was raised, you proly too, on white nature. Dickinson, Whitman, Frost, Bishop, Sandburg, Creeley, Ginsburg; and yes, not only is Black nature poetry as manifold as white, it's essential. It can not be fairly summarized as one type, just as white can't. But there's no doubt these poets bring painfully aware metaphor to a forest of trees, for example, which white poets are conditioned not to see. It's awful and beautiful to realize the toothless gaping holes in your limited experience, right? That's why we need others. We need those nothing like ourselves to see true. Many of these poems feel more seated, more soiled in the blood soaked American earth, than the idyllic pastorals of white lyres wowing tower maidens.
Beautiful book. I'm grateful to see nature from Black views as well as white. We overlap. In many ways we Americans are so the same. And then because evil ignorance and racism drilled into our marrow from birth to death to our children's children's birth and death we are not the same. A tree is not one tree. A forest not the same forest. A flower is not the same flower for 2 poets born opposite side of America's racial divide.
One reason this book pulses and doesn't flatline is Dungy didn't chronologically order it. Brilliant decision! The poems instead are organized into 10 sections, each one introduced by a short prose piece by a featured poet. So you're not crawling from way back when slowly, ever so slowly, to now. (Yawn.) You're immersed in Black ecopoetic visions, a simultaneity of them zigzagging all over time. And why not have Phillis Wheatley of 1770 followed by Nikki Giovanni of 1970? If they're singing concordantly let's hear them together on stage.
The poets featured are from all over the map. I was introduced to so many writers. Yeah, I'm ignorant, just more aware of it. Book 1 opens with Ed Roberson then Lucille Clifton, just two of the phenomenal writers I came to love through this book. There's 93 poets featured, 180 poems, so you see many more than once, and a handful 4-5 times. GE Patterson, June Jordan, Yusef Komunyakaa, Robert Hayden, Gerald Barrax, Sr., Camille T. Dungy, Major Jackson, Alice Walker, Natasha Trethewey, Phillis Wheatley and Amaud Jamaul Johnson are some of the poets I loved in here, their painfilled at times sublime nature.
I was raised, you proly too, on white nature. Dickinson, Whitman, Frost, Bishop, Sandburg, Creeley, Ginsburg; and yes, not only is Black nature poetry as manifold as white, it's essential. It can not be fairly summarized as one type, just as white can't. But there's no doubt these poets bring painfully aware metaphor to a forest of trees, for example, which white poets are conditioned not to see. It's awful and beautiful to realize the toothless gaping holes in your limited experience, right? That's why we need others. We need those nothing like ourselves to see true. Many of these poems feel more seated, more soiled in the blood soaked American earth, than the idyllic pastorals of white lyres wowing tower maidens.
Beautiful book. I'm grateful to see nature from Black views as well as white. We overlap. In many ways we Americans are so the same. And then because evil ignorance and racism drilled into our marrow from birth to death to our children's children's birth and death we are not the same. A tree is not one tree. A forest not the same forest. A flower is not the same flower for 2 poets born opposite side of America's racial divide.
March 22, 2020
Reading this book is like opening a jewel box. Every piece of prose and poetry is deep, emotional and powerful. The arrangement of the poems in cycles, and the introductions to each cycle, help the reader to enter more fully into the images depicted. Once you've read this book, you will look at nature with a greater appreciation of its beauty, and with a greater appreciation of African Americans' experience of the natural world. It's a work of brilliance.
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December 7, 2024Such a great anthology! Perhaps overexpansive, but with such an expansive (and persuasive) re-opening of what nature poetry is, of the scope of so called eco-poetry, of what African American poetry is. I dog-eared so many pages.
So many of the poets I didn't know about, which is not just about my ignorance, but the breadth and depth of the poetry Dungy pulled from--many of the poets I was curious to read more of, for example, are out of print.
The book also happens to focus on the sort of destabilizing narrative poetry, finely balanced with strong voice and a confrontational edge, that I particularly love.
So many of the poets I didn't know about, which is not just about my ignorance, but the breadth and depth of the poetry Dungy pulled from--many of the poets I was curious to read more of, for example, are out of print.
The book also happens to focus on the sort of destabilizing narrative poetry, finely balanced with strong voice and a confrontational edge, that I particularly love.
June 16, 2025
All poets should read this but especially ecopoets!!!!!
November 21, 2020
In this thought provoking collection of poetry, compiled by Camille Dungy - an English professor at Colorado State University and author of several books, are over 180 pieces written by African American poets over the past four centuries. Dungy describes the significance of an anthology of solely black work, “Many black writers simply do not look at their environment from the same perspective as Anglo-Saxon writers who discourse with the natural world … in a great deal of African American poetry we see poems written from the perspective of the workers of the field” (xxi). Dungy organizes the poems into ten cycles - each cycle a strand of ecopoetics. Throughout the various and intertwining cycles readers are reminded that “we are always part of the natural world, even when we feel most alienated from it” (xxix). One of the benefits to an anthology of poetry is that you can pick it up whenever you feel like it and read one page or 40. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in moving beyond nature poetry as just 19th century pastoral scenes and exploring city eclogues, discussions of place and home, and the black perspective of nature that has been obscured for centuries.
December 16, 2020
This is a great anthology. The poetry is terrific. The argument the editor in her introductory essay makes is convincing. Instead of chapters, the book is organized into ten “cycles.” Each cycle opens with an interesting essay. Then the reader gets a healthy sample of poets and poems in each cycle. A great resource, one that will help me build my knowledge and collection of African American poets.
October 27, 2021
An amazing collection. Some of the standouts for me were by Kendra Hamilton, Ross Gay, Yusuf Komunyakaa, and Lucille Clifton.
This anthology is 350 pages of poetry. That’s a lot to try to read straight through, and since I chose this book for the Read Harder challenge, I wanted to actually read all of it in one go. But next year if I include a similar lengthy book of poetry, I’ll start it at the beginning of the year and read just a few poems at a time.
This anthology is 350 pages of poetry. That’s a lot to try to read straight through, and since I chose this book for the Read Harder challenge, I wanted to actually read all of it in one go. But next year if I include a similar lengthy book of poetry, I’ll start it at the beginning of the year and read just a few poems at a time.
January 27, 2022
Beautiful, eclectic, deep and reverent. This anthology of poems about nature was stunning. Each section denoted our effect on nature and nature’s effect on us- the healing of nature, the memory of nature, the reminders that nature brings to us regarding both the good we have done and the evil we have done to others. A must read, especially for those more unfamiliar with the wide breadth of African American poets. This is a book that I will return to again and again.
March 25, 2021
Great book with a large and varied collection of black poets past and present all celebrating nature and what it means to them. These writers have often been left out of the spotlight in the world of nature writing but no more. I'm so grateful to Camille Dungy for putting these together and bringing these voices to light. This book is a beautiful treasure that I'm honored to have read.
July 5, 2021
Would love to see a new edition of this with work by poets who have thrived in the last 10+ years. Wished for more older works. Love that it's not just one poem per poet that has the unwieldy job of being "representative," but often several of their works. Love the thematic organization and the magical juxtapositions it offers.
October 22, 2023
Oh my goodness, one of the most important books ever. Despite the label, I had the softcover, purchased years ago at a pre-pandemic Decatur Book Festival in Georgia. The poems are just tremendous, and I recommend it as a reference book for everyone.
I'll get the hardcover if I can find it - it is that important.
I'll get the hardcover if I can find it - it is that important.
January 1, 2019
Many of the greatest African American poets are included: Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes, Alice Walker, Claudia Rankine, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Sherley Anne Williams... Frustratingly missing are J. Drew Lanham and Annette Hope Billings.
June 9, 2020
I read this like 4 years ago! No idea why I never recorded it here. Anyway it is very satisfying, well organized, and worth immersing oneself in. Some really beautiful poetry I'd never seen anthologized anywhere else.
December 17, 2020
This is a wonderfully edited and produced anthology. There were so many excellent poets I came across here who I had not read or heard of prior to this. Each section is prefaced by a prose passage from a different contributor. One of my favorite reading experiences in the last 5 years for sure.
March 22, 2024
Here are bits and pieces of the informal analysis I did for a Nature Literature course (it's choppy because I was also doing analysis of some works not in this collection):
"
I think that the authors all wrote these pieces to really express how deeply integrated they and their cultures are with nature... I really got the sense that to be alive is to be one with nature and to cherish it. The piece "To Waste at Trees" adds beautifully onto that sentiment with “But it’s when you don’t care about the world That you begin owning and destroying it” which further demonstrates that when you disconnect yourself from treating nature like the life it is, that’s when you become more inhumane and can start doing the horrific things that we’ve seen done in the past and even today still.
...I couldn’t choose a favorite piece but a line in "A Black Man Talks of Reaping" has really stuck with me and that is “They have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit.”. There is just so many ways to interpret it and I think it is meant to be more so about slave owners and the people who benefited from slavery in general and bitterness towards them, but I immediately made a connection with the bitterness some generations have toward their younger generations, even though those are the people they were fighting for most of the time. The whole poem is packed full of that generational trauma feel and I think it is very fitting with the nature theme because you can try to burn away a prairie but there will still be seeds deep in the soil even if it takes them years to flower again.
"
Typically when I read collections like this I don't like to look too much more into pieces than what they are telling me, because then the whole piece can become a completely different thing. However, it was nice being able to make connections that weren't explicitly said and for all I know, could be completely wrong interpretations, but I suppose the enjoyment of poetry is the way you chose to read and understand the words.
"
I think that the authors all wrote these pieces to really express how deeply integrated they and their cultures are with nature... I really got the sense that to be alive is to be one with nature and to cherish it. The piece "To Waste at Trees" adds beautifully onto that sentiment with “But it’s when you don’t care about the world That you begin owning and destroying it” which further demonstrates that when you disconnect yourself from treating nature like the life it is, that’s when you become more inhumane and can start doing the horrific things that we’ve seen done in the past and even today still.
...I couldn’t choose a favorite piece but a line in "A Black Man Talks of Reaping" has really stuck with me and that is “They have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit.”. There is just so many ways to interpret it and I think it is meant to be more so about slave owners and the people who benefited from slavery in general and bitterness towards them, but I immediately made a connection with the bitterness some generations have toward their younger generations, even though those are the people they were fighting for most of the time. The whole poem is packed full of that generational trauma feel and I think it is very fitting with the nature theme because you can try to burn away a prairie but there will still be seeds deep in the soil even if it takes them years to flower again.
"
Typically when I read collections like this I don't like to look too much more into pieces than what they are telling me, because then the whole piece can become a completely different thing. However, it was nice being able to make connections that weren't explicitly said and for all I know, could be completely wrong interpretations, but I suppose the enjoyment of poetry is the way you chose to read and understand the words.
April 17, 2025
This is a fantastic and wide-ranging collection of nature poetry by African-Americans. Given the authors, the focus is on North American nature, which is to be expected, but there's such a enormous variety in approaches here that - the ten themed sections of the book aside - every page has something new and different. A lot of the poems are political in nature, as nature is linked to history and conflict and landscape, but then I've always thought of both poetry and nature as inherently political things anyway, given human creation and interaction, so I find that appealing.
There are simply too many poems here to mention by name, but three of them stood out to me as favourites. The first was "Ambition II: Mosquito in the Mist" by Tim Seibles, which was written from the point of view of a mosquito and was surprising and delightful. The second was "Swimchant of Nigger Mer-Folk (An Aquaboogie Set in Lapis)" by Douglas Kearney, which had a particularly interesting structure and topography. The one that really affected me most, though - I must have read it a dozen times now, and plan to hunt down the author's books so I can find and buy the collection that it's in - was "Emmet Till" by James A. Emanuel. A horrendous topic, but an absolutely gorgeous poem.
There are simply too many poems here to mention by name, but three of them stood out to me as favourites. The first was "Ambition II: Mosquito in the Mist" by Tim Seibles, which was written from the point of view of a mosquito and was surprising and delightful. The second was "Swimchant of Nigger Mer-Folk (An Aquaboogie Set in Lapis)" by Douglas Kearney, which had a particularly interesting structure and topography. The one that really affected me most, though - I must have read it a dozen times now, and plan to hunt down the author's books so I can find and buy the collection that it's in - was "Emmet Till" by James A. Emanuel. A horrendous topic, but an absolutely gorgeous poem.
April 30, 2025
With the death of my father happening last week, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry edited by Camille T. Dungy, was like a warm, comfortable hug for me. It is full of the best of the best of African American poets. It's full of ten "cycles" or sections with different themes concerning nature. Black Americans have a special relationship with nature. Our ancestors were forced into enslavement and spent their time with nature. The trees and water protected us, but also Southern trees were hanging trees for the lynched. Even with climate change, the most vulnerable areas are areas heavily populated by Black people. Environmental racism and the climate collapse disparity are things that Black people should keep an eye on. I think about "cancer alley" in Louisiana and the Southeastern United States, disproportionately impacting Black people. Additionally, the South is mostly inhabitable today because of air conditioning, making it possible. Our people's relationship nature, like many things, is one of sorrow and survival. This was such a wonderful book to read, and I will add it to my library immediately.
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December 23, 2022Expanding the definition of what constitutes nature writing beyond wild or pastoral, this iconic collection features 180 poems from 93 poets who together provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history. Black poets have been writing about the natural world from the very beginning, and here you’ll find classic giants like Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Lucille Clifton, and Richard Wright alongside more contemporary voices such as Major Jackson, Sean Hill, Natasha Trethewey, and Janice Harrington.
Review published originally with Orion Magazine:https://orionmagazine.org/2021/08/ele...
Review published originally with Orion Magazine:https://orionmagazine.org/2021/08/ele...
April 17, 2024
To align with the fascism of PEN america is to align with the destruction of the earth and its people everywhere. It is to take a stance that negates all principles of alignment with and co-existence with the living earth that have guided Black peoples of Africa and the Diaspora since time immemorial. It is a breach of something beyond the holy, something beyond that which is worthy of forgiveness.
October 1, 2020
A really wonderful collection - I guess one struggle I had was how much it jumped through time and place, with no real indication of context of author bio. It felt a bit random at times. But I, like others, have so many doggy-eared pages, poems to revisit in the very near future. And I might even research some of the context on my own.
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