chapbook

Review: Poems on Nature

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Cover image of "Poems on Nature" by various poets.

Poems on Nature (Signature Select Classics), various authors. Sterling Publishing Co. (ISBN: 781454944768) 2022.

Summary: A chapbook of several dozen poems by the world’s greatest poets on the natural world, the air, the sea, and the land.

A book I’m reading on poetry right now advises that the best way to get into reading poetry is to read and notice what particularly arrests our attention and gives us pleasure.. So I decided to follow this advice with this delightful chapbook that a local bookstore threw in as an “extra” with my other purchases. Poems on Nature collects several dozen poems from some of the “greats” in poetry. These include Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Christina Rosetti, William Blake, Sara Teasdale, and many others.

The poems are organized around “Air,” “Sea,” and “Land.” I’ll mention one or two in each section that I particularly enjoyed. You’ll probably like different ones, and that is just fine!

Under “Air,” I delighted in revisiting Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy” with its famous line “I know why the caged bird sings…” I had not encountered John Greenleaf Whittier’s “The Robin,” in which he recounts the words of an old Welshwoman explaining how the robin got its red breast. In addition, there are poems from Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Yeats, and others.

“The Sea” poems evoked for me something of the sea’s mysterious character. Christina Rosetti in “By the Sea” asks “Why does the sea moan evermore?” By contrast, Thomas Campion celebrates the empire of Neptune in “A Hymn in Praise of Neptune.” Then Alfred, Lord Tennyson evokes our fears of sea creatures of the deeps in “The Kraken.” I’ve always found thought-provoking the image of the ebbing of “The Sea of Faith” in “Dover Beach.”

Finally, the section on “Land begins with Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” We all know the opening lines “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.” But do you remember her self-deprecating concluding lines: “Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree”? Then Vachel Lindsay speaks for every homeowner in “The Dandelion” that is “rich and haughty.” It scorns the lawn-mower, even when its “yellow heads are cut away.” “By noon you raise a sea of stars / More golden than before.”

Sara Teasdale concludes the collection with “There will come soft rains (War Time).” She describes the coming of spring in a time of war. She concludes with a haunting pair of couplets:

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we are gone.

This should give give us all pause amid our hubristic pretensions.

Poems on Nature is ideal for gifts. The first page even has “to” and “from” lines for inscriptions. The chapbook format makes for easy carrying, more portable than an e-book. It is a great introduction to several dozen great poets without the bulky anthology. I really must thank my local bookseller!

Review: Mountain Offerings

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Mountain Offerings, Amy Allen. Montpelier, VT: Rootstock Publishing, 2024.

Summary: A chapbook of narrative verse capturing memories of childhood, summer vacations in the mountains, growing love, parenting, and loss.

It is a wonderful thing when a writer’s work draws us into a different world than our own and yet evokes analogue memories in our own lives. That’s what I found happening repeatedly in this chapbook of poems by Amy Allen, a freelance editor and writer from Vermont.

We are invited into the world of Vermont, a state I’ve only driven through. One of her early poems even celebrates folk singer Noah Kahan’s unofficial anthem (I had to Google it!) for Vermont and the weird love we can have for our home state–maybe not so weird. She celebrates both its obvious and subtler beauties in “Pilgrimage.” There are the memories of arriving at a summer cabin in June, with all the summer ahead, and early winter sunsets over Lake Champlain after which “The stars shine brightest/on the coldest of days.”

We have a young couple sharing a “Tiny House” in mud season or climbing a mountain together to the summit and a knowledge of each other forged “without ever touching.” In “Gathering,” the couple watches their daughter gather pine cones while studying one together. Later she finds he has left one on the bedstand as she slides under the covers next to him. A couple of poems remember what seems to have been their daughter in a serious medical emergency–a greenhouse that gave respite and the implied understandings in family lounges. “Daughter of Mine” captures the moment one realizes the transition of the daughter toward adulthood, toward being her own unique person, a marvel and a mystery.

Allen traces the seasons of life, including the cleaning out of a parent’s house in “My Mother’s Flowers.” She describes “Heavy-lidded casserole dishes/cookbooks with margin notes/penciled in her cursive/framed photos of ourselves/leather handbags we’d given her on birthdays/three unopened jars of her face cream/I wondered when I’d forget that smell.” Many of us, if we reached a certain age, carry memories like this.

Sure, these poems evoke memories from childhood summers to flirtations and deepening loves, to the joys and heartbreaking moments of parenthood. She calls to mind those special places of our lives. More than this, she reminds me, in the words of Mary Oliver of our “one wild and precious life.” In most of the poems we remember analogues from our own lives, but in “Hope is a Voice” she reminded us of our shared experience of the dark days of January 2021 and the moment a young woman in a yellow coat invited us to step toward the light as she reminded us of “the hill we must climb.” In Mountain Offerings, Amy Allen reminds us in times of innocence, wonder, sadness, intimacy, and hope of all that is precious in our passing lives.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book for review from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program.