Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City

by Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Emily Hiestand

Deep in the concrete canyons of even the largest cities, nature lurks. Its unpredictable energies animate not only squirrels and microorganisms, not only ginkgoes, roots, and rivers, but also the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1571314105
• ISBN13: 9781571314109
• Release Date: June 2000
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A strong, fun collection

Having always mused over the matter of why so many poets write poems about nature when most modern poets live in cities (or at least in non-rural settings), it was refreshing to discover this book. It is a strong collection of poets mostly wrtiing in their voices about their experiences (most importantly) as we suspect they truly are. A collection like this also allows for the inclusion of some creatures that don't always get their just due in nature poetry, like roaches, or old stand-bys in new allocations (like horses pulling collection wagons or in the city zoo...you get the idea). A strong collection with a nice breadth of styles and voices, and a fair sense of humor bubbling just beneath the surface. Highly recommended, especially if you think all poetry these days is either loud and political or soft and pastorale navel-gazing.

Urban Nature: An Oxymoron?

Have you ever had the urge, while waiting for a traffic signal, to get out of your car for a better look at a flock of starlings veering and banking in tandem against an early evening pink November sky? If so, you might enjoy this collection of poems. Nature exists even in our cities, and this anthology is for the most part a celebration of that fact. Although many of the poems lament our failure to better accommodate nature in our urban environments, a larger number seem inspired by the natural beauty that can still be found there if we only pause to notice. There are over 150 selections all together, some from new poets, others from known poets, all reflecting upon some aspect of urban nature, from geraniums in the office (they smell like shovels) to a salamander in the video store parking lot. My approach to this anthology was to slowly peruse the pages, searching not for a whole poem that I immediately love - those are always rare - but for an evocative phrase, an image, sound or metaphor that stirred me enough to beg my return. With apologies for not mentioning any names, let me splice together a few examples to capture the flavor. Here's an earthmover parked across a vacant field from a sycamore whose bark curls like site maps and blueprints unrolled in a distant room, a million frogs shrieking like background music for the big bang, falling magnolia petals, the smell of road kill or fresh baked bread and beer brewing as the morning swells with promise. The second time through I recognized some places where I'd been before but realized that I had overlooked some good ones such as the horse with the colossal nostrils, squirrels embracing their way up a tree, a national convention of republican cockroaches in the kitchen at night, azaleas confused by the bright lights installed after a burglary. There are poems about seasons: a snow plow shoves aside the early morning quiet, people laughing and shoveling together, butts of mother nature's joke; spring grass is what the earth sang; summer nights sleeping on the porch, crickets; fallen leaves flat-plastered on a wet sidewalk, bring in the houseplants - nature is most seductive when about to die. There is a pleasing sparsity of poems about dogs and cats but birds are frequently featured, bad birds, uninvited, that swarm in and unpack right on private property, and good birds - a brave sparrow whose heart is smaller than a heart should be, a cardinal, its throat abounding with information, swans eating out of hands, an egret fishing in the feculent marsh, a thrush, its song a small aggression taken for joy. A whirlwind of chittering chimney swifts funnels down to roost, a pileated woodpecker ratchets around tree trunks, the scream of a redtail hawk strips varnish from the heart. As might be expected pigeons are popular, waddling cheek by jowl among the bag ladies, their low voltage moans, their necks scarved with liquid green rainbows, beaks evolved for gutter cracks and h