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Last month, as a winter storm chilled Louisiana and much of the country, I sat in my armchair and read \u201cDiving Into Nature,\u201d a new poetry collection inspired by the skies, trees, fields, rivers and woods that help define our corner of the world.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s state poet laureate are part of the mix.<\/p>\n
January\u2019s ice and wind offer a regular reminder that nature, whatever its bright gifts and beautiful moments, isn\u2019t uniformly benign.<\/p>\n
Louisiana\u2019s 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 \u201cDiving Into Nature\u201d make clear. They never seem at a loss for things to write about.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
At first glance, the title of \u201cDiving Into Nature\u201d 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\u2019re already<\/em> immersed in nature, even those of us who dwell within city blocks.<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n All of this came to mind while reading one of the poems in this collection, \u201cRiver Trash,\u201d by Nicole Cooley. Like an archaeologist picking through ruins, the poem\u2019s narrator casts an eye around the banks of the Mississippi, taking an inventory of what\u2019s been left behind.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cShredded roof shingles. Bottle of Fireball,\u201d she notes at one point.<\/p>\n The poem soon reveals other discoveries: \u201cFork crushed in dirt. Pair of orange earbuds.\u201d What we\u2019re witnessing, in the litter left by those who didn\u2019t care, is a desecration.<\/p>\n \u201cYet on my walk back to my father\u2019s house,\u201d Cooley concludes, \u201cswitchgrass flashes gold.\u201d<\/p>\n Even a bruised paradise like ours, the poem seems to suggest, can offer possibilities of redemption.<\/p>\n Another poem, Brad Richard\u2019s \u201cThe Bird,\u201d chronicles a nightlong encounter with a mockingbird, a species known for singing through the wee hours. Richard\u2019s poem unfolds as a single paragraph, its prose structure perfectly simulating the way that mockers talk, talk, talk a listener into submission.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt lives in a tree beside a house, a sodium lamp lights its nest,\u201d he writes. \u201cWhen I hear its song, I feel at home.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u00a0\u2014 the one of our daily making, and the wider, wilder one from which we all came.<\/p>\n