a note from the editors

As the world confronts a pandemic, a sharpened awareness of racial injustice and the protests it has sparked, and irrepressibly cascading environmental anxieties, the landscapes and creatures in these pages make a small but resolute contribution. To what project? That of reminding ourselves and each other that the natural world is never separate from human life. I and my issue co-editor Cory Willingham are proud to put these reminders before you.

At numerous points in this issue, our poets gesture toward the quiet persistence of the natural world as a counterpoint to human turmoil. I’ll cite a few examples… Sally Nacker’s “Kindness in Winter” imagines a child feeding apples to a wary doe in the deepening snow. Erica Fletcher’s “There Are So Many Things” dwells in the fleeting pleasures of urban nature: sledding children, the pendulous nest of an oriole, the first teasing warmth of a February thaw. Sean Ferrier-Watson’s “Caprock Canyon” places human visitors in a stark desert landscape where towering formations of earth and clay dwarf the hikers who pass among them. A hawk overhead continues about its way with a clarity of purpose that humans rarely share. (The whippoorwill, one presumes, is occupied elsewhere.) And Jefferson Navicky’s “Salamanders” finds unexpected, liquidly-slithering life beneath stacked firewood.

Other poets confront the darker edges of our ecological moment. Connie Bacchus’s paired poems “grand coulee in wildfire smoke” and “before the wildfires” evoke a landscape first calm and then obscured by disorienting smoke.

In TR Poulson’s Acadia Poetry Prize-winning sonnet, “Dairy Farmer’s Daughter Considers Climate Change,” a sad truth about the social ecology of contemporary America is encoded in the rhyme implied between “schools” and “slaughter.” Imagination then leaps forward into a speculative future of altered winds and vanished ecosystems even as the speaker clings to their hope of protecting a single animal and the life it might yet bring into the world.

Nature poetry has never been merely pastoral. It is a literature of relationship: between people and place, memory and weather, grief and renewal, cloud and clod, soul and soil. In a year defined by upheaval, these poems search for caring relations and shared relatedness in the world around us. In doing so, they find temporary steadiness within a disrupted moment.

— Zachary Bos, Co-editor

<< return to the Table of Contents for New Series #10: Winter 2020, Volume 5 Number 2