Book Club

Books

The Sea Around Us – Rachel Carson
The Great Derangement – Amitav Ghosh
Art Forms in Nature – Ernst Haeckel
The Forest Unseen – David George Haskell
The California Field Atlas* – Obi Kaufmann
Certainly More Than You Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Northwest – Milton S. Love
Metamorphoses – Ovid
The Overstory – Richard Powers
Travels with Charley in Search of America – John Steinbeck
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
Articulate Earth and The Klamath Knot – David Rains Wallace

*This book was essentially my bible for the summer of 2019

Poetry

Collections

New and Selected Poems – Mary Oliver
The Ecopoetry Anthology – Edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street
Leavings – Wendell Berry
The Essential Emily Dickinson – Emily Dickinson, edited by Joyce Carol Oates
The Complete Poems of Walt Whitman – Walt Whitman

Poets

Michelle Boisseau

“Ugglig” – Excerpt – from “The Best American Poetry 2016” edited by David Lehman and Edward Hirsch

Ugly is the mother of the sublime—dreadful
and magnetic, it sucks you over edges
with the torque of awe, so much like love
it must be love.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), whom both Joyce Carol Oates and I would have be required reading for every president.

‘Nature’ is what we see…
Nature is what we know—
Yet have no art to say—
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity.

“The skies can’t keep their secret!”

…If I should bribe the little bird,
Who knows but she would tell?
I think I won’t, however,
It’s finer not to know;
If summer were an axiom,
What sorcery had snow?

From Bartleby’s Emily Dickinson: Complete Poems – Part II: Nature

Robert Duncan (1919-1988)

“Poetry, a Natural Thing”
The poem
feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,
to breed itself,
a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.

Lola Haskins

“The Sandhill Cranes”
The long bones of sandhill cranes
know their next pond. Not us.
When something is too beautiful,
we do not have the grace to leave.

Mary Oliver (1935-2019), of whom Maxine Kumin remarked, “[she] stands quite comfortably on the margins of things, on the line between earth and sky, the thin membrane that separates human from what we loosely call animal.”

“To Begin With, the Sweet Grass” from Evidence: Poems, 2010
…Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.
And someone’s face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful…

The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you, my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know.
Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes…

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.

from “A Year of Being Here“

“The Moths”
If I stopped and thought, maybe
the world
can’t be saved,
the pain
was unbearable.”

“The Old Poets of China” from Why I Wake Early, 2005
Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

“To Foreign Lands” from Leaves of Grass
I heard that you ask’d for something to prove this puzzle the New World,
And to define America, her athletic Democracy,
Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.