Last month, as a winter storm chilled Louisiana and much of the country, I sat in my armchair and read “Diving Into Nature,” a new poetry collection inspired by the skies, trees, fields, rivers and woods that help define our corner of the world.
Produced by Portals Press, a small publisher based in New Orleans, the anthology includes 70 poems by 66 poets, all with ties to Louisiana. Eight writers who have served as Louisiana’s state poet laureate are part of the mix.
January’s ice and wind offer a regular reminder that nature, whatever its bright gifts and beautiful moments, isn’t uniformly benign.
Louisiana’s floods and hurricanes also tell us this is so. With its sublime power to both give and take away, nature has always been a durable source of inspiration for poets, as the contributors to “Diving Into Nature” make clear. They never seem at a loss for things to write about.
At first glance, the title of “Diving Into Nature” might be read as an invitation to plunge into pastoral settings, embracing the ideal of getting away from it all. But at their best, these poems point readers to a larger truth. We’re already immersed in nature, even those of us who dwell within city blocks.
It’s the air we breathe, the water we drink, the broader web of life that supports our own. In ignoring that basic reality, as we often do, we make the neglect of nature more likely.
All of this came to mind while reading one of the poems in this collection, “River Trash,” by Nicole Cooley. Like an archaeologist picking through ruins, the poem’s narrator casts an eye around the banks of the Mississippi, taking an inventory of what’s been left behind.
“Shredded roof shingles. Bottle of Fireball,” she notes at one point.
The poem soon reveals other discoveries: “Fork crushed in dirt. Pair of orange earbuds.” What we’re witnessing, in the litter left by those who didn’t care, is a desecration.
“Yet on my walk back to my father’s house,” Cooley concludes, “switchgrass flashes gold.”
Even a bruised paradise like ours, the poem seems to suggest, can offer possibilities of redemption.
Another poem, Brad Richard’s “The Bird,” chronicles a nightlong encounter with a mockingbird, a species known for singing through the wee hours. Richard’s poem unfolds as a single paragraph, its prose structure perfectly simulating the way that mockers talk, talk, talk a listener into submission.
“It lives in a tree beside a house, a sodium lamp lights its nest,” he writes. “When I hear its song, I feel at home.”
That tireless mockingbird, perched between two worlds, is a straddler of sorts, as are we. To read these poems, compiled and curated by John P. Travis, is to remember that we live in both of those worlds, too — the one of our daily making, and the wider, wilder one from which we all came.
Email Danny Heitman at [email protected].
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