The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature

By: ILL, Christo

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0879053763
• ISBN13: 9780879053765
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Gibbs Smith
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.0" x 0.8" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Cultivating a new respect for Nature & its creatures.

THE FORGOTTEN LANGUAGE : Contemporary Poets and Nature. Edited by Christopher Merrill. 176 pp. Salt Lake City : Peregrine Smith Books, 1991. Some years ago wasps built a nest in the eaves of my house. Occasionally I'd see the odd wasp buzzing about my garden, but since I never bothered them, they never bothered me. But they did bother my neighbors in the next house, who asked me to destroy the nest. I felt pretty bad about hosing the nest away, and while watching the wasps buzzing about in confusion trying to take in what was happening, the loss of their home. The present book, a book in which "each of the poems ... is a plea on behalf of the wild," is a book for people like my neighbors and the many others like them.Merrill's Preface and Introduction are fine pieces of writing. Both take up the desperate need for a new, healthier, and saner attitude to Nature and its creatures, the need to abandon current arrogance and selfishness, the need to cultivate a new respect. He cites Galway Kinnell on the infinite value of all creatures, and on the deep mystery which inheres in them. He also cites W. S. Merwin as being firmly convinced of the impossibility of anyone becoming fully human without being "nourished" by the nonhuman. And there are equally true and important observations from many other sensitive, concerned, and intelligent writers. But I wonder if anyone is listening?The book contains over 125 poems, one or two from each of 93 of today's best US poets. Of them Merwin writes : What these poems suggest in their various ways is the need to respect the earth, which has suffered so much at our hands" (page xvii). This is an entirely laudable aim, but although it's apparent in some poems, it seems to be curiously absent from others. Personally I find it impossible to reconcile a respect for living creatures with a poem such as Carol Frost's 'To Kill a Deer' (page 50), a poem which - unless I've missed something - seems to celebrate that blasting of holes in the fabric of being which is euphemistically referred to as the sport of hunting. And there are other questionable poems in this anthology.Fortunately, these are far outweighed by truly positive and inspiring poems such as A. R. Ammons 'Corsons Inlet,' Margaret Atwood's 'Elegy for the Giant Tortoises,' Hayden Carruth's 'Essay,' James Dickey's 'The Heaven of Animals,' Stephen Dunn's 'From Underneath,' Denise Levertov's 'Come into Animal Presence,' David Waggoner's 'Meeting a Bear,' and a host of others.As an anthology I would rate this book very highly. The central idea around which most of the poems cohere is one that is vitally important for modern society to understand. In it's most sophisticated form it finds expression in A. R. Ammons' lines :". . . not so much looking for the shape / as being available / to any shape that may be / summoning itself / through me / from the self not mine but ours" (page xix).Readers of Dogen will understand at once what Ammons is ge