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By Simmons Buntin, August 23, 2010 11:59 am

William Bartram: The Search for Nature’s Design – Selected Art, Letters, and Unpublished Writings
Edited by Thomas Hallock and Nancy E. Hoffman
The University of Georgia Press, 2010, 520 pages

Reviewed by Claudia Broman

William Bartram (1739-1823) was much more than a botanist.  He was an influential philosopher and thinker in colonial America whose unorthodox views of life’s interconnectedness filtered through his interests in nature and exploration.

Thomas Hallock, assistant professor of English at the University of South Florida, and Nancy E. Hoffman, adjunct professor at Villanova University, explore these lesser-known aspects of William Bartram in William Bartram: The Search for Nature’s Design.

The book, which presents previously unpublished material by Bartram, results in a more complete picture of the man behind many, if not most, of the botanical observations made in North America in the 1700s.

Bartram was the son of a self-taught botanist and lived on a farm in Kingsessing township in Pennsylvania.  For four years in the 1770s Bartram gathered botanical specimens on an exploratory tour of the southeastern United States.  His observations were published in the book Travels in 1791.

Correspondence included in The Search for Nature’s Design traces Bartram’s botanical adventures in chronology.  His previously unpublished papers cover botany, medicine, geography, gardening, native culture, slavery, environmental protection, commerce, aesthetics, philosophy, and religion.  Illuminated journal entries and botanical illustrations depict the natural detail of the 18th-century America Bartram observed.

William Bartram: The Search for Nature’s Design provides contextual depth for a man who continues to influence the nature writing, botanical, and horticultural movements in the United States today.

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Learn more about William Bartram by reading Lucy Rowland’s article, “America’s ‘First’ Rare Plant: The Franklin Tree” from Terrain.org Issue No. 18.

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Claudia Broman lives in Ashland, Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared in Writing Nature: An Annual of Fine Nature Writing and Drawing.

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By Simmons Buntin, August 17, 2010 4:54 pm

Recently, artist Nicole Antebi sent us a little information about a new media/book website:

Water, CA: Creative Visualizations for a New Millennium
www.watercalifornia.org

Water, CA is a series of 22 contemporary projects engaging the history, mystery, and challenge of California’s water. Presented by Antebi and artist Enid Baxter Blader, Water, CA is a multimedia experiment in geography that incorporates mythological and playful understandings of complex histories. The enticingly interactive website features essays, painting, photography, video animations, and a California water timeline.

And I think we may just be looking at the future of creative, place-based multimedia. It is accessible, informative, artistic, and — once you’re familiar with the format — easy to move through. I admit it took me a while to figure out how to get into the individual projects (hover over the location of your choice then click the artist’s name). Ideally there should be a connect between the list of water projects in the blue box and the website visitor’s ability to then get into the projects — but they only indicate where in the state those projects are located. Just remember where they’re at, hover your pointer over that location, and you can dive in, so to speak.

That aside, we at Terrain.org think this is a pretty fantastic collaborative effort, and encourage you to check it out, pronto.

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By Simmons Buntin, June 7, 2010 1:56 pm

One of the advantages of editing a journal like Terrain.org is that we often receive books from Terrain.org contributors, sometimes containing work appearing in our journal, sometimes not. Recently we received a trio of what — with only a small dip into each — I can already tell are searing landscapes of poetry. I’m excited to read them, and suspect you will be excited and delighted  once you’ve read them, too. Here’s a bit on each, with links to go out and get yours now:

Girl on a Bridge
Poems by Suzanne Frischkorn
Main Street Rag Publishing Co., 39 poems in 57 pages

“Suzanne Frischkorn is a fierce and fearless poet. In Girl on a Bridge, she first upends our dainty notions of girlhood and then leads us into the wilderness of violence, madness, fear, and love — and does so with beauty and tenderness.”
– Julianna Baggott

“Good citizens beware: Suzanne Frischkorn has let Girl on a Bridge loose on the world and she’s spreading the word about the furies of femininity and the madness of motherhood with its ‘stone weight of home.’ These poems burn holes on the fairy tale pages of domestic fantasy and uncover the treacherous (though more exciting) narratives of those women who dare stray from the path or, at the very least, who celebrate their desires: ‘What’s more flattering than being wanted by a mouth that waters?’ This book of finely-crafted verse holds up its poetry like a lovely razor blade.”
– Rigoberto Gonzalez

Read poetry by Suzanne Frischkorn appearing in Terrain.org Issue No. 18, and look for a review of Girl on a Bridge in our next issue, online in mid-September.

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Venison: A Poem
By Thorpe Moeckel
Etruscan Press, 1 poem in 66 pages

“Food doesn’t get any more local, cosmic, primitive, tasty, or disturbing than in this book-length, lyrical-meditative poem. At stake are no less than the origins and mysteries of flesh and touch.”
– from the book back cover

“Thorpe Moeckel’s Venison is civilized and wild, like a life lived well, a barbaric yawp of pain and joy and true wonder at the brilliant ordinariness of a life lived close to the earth and close to the bone. Moeckel’s fine poetic is whetted on the visceral and cannily transcendental. Read it.”
– Christopher Camuto

“This book, a glorious and breath-taking incantation of the beauty to be found in killing for nourishment, spins into the realms of woods, home, family, and community. The language is dizzying, as beautiful as you’ll ever read.”
– Janisse Ray

Reading poetry by Thorpe Moeckel appearing in Terrain.org Issue No. 24 and Issue No. 24.

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The Surfacing of Excess
Poems by Arianne Zwartjes
Winner of the 2009 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry
Eastern Washington University Press, 13 poems & 38 stitches in 87 pages

“These lively ‘eco-poems’ take the marvelous, but endangered, species called language on a lively quest for sustenance. Arianne Zwartjes contemplates mysteries, politics, emotions, and aesthetics, indulging us with a feast of realities. The ‘surfacing of excess’ turns out not to be a clever phrase, or a ruse, but the hard work that a beautiful mind accomplishes, thinking about life, in Zwartjes’s case, in an interlinked diction of science and religion, which resolves itself in a language of love.”
– Jane Miller

“Arianne Zwartjes’s thoughtful, playful poems map the surfaces of language, image, flight, and architecture. Reading The Surfacing of Excess is like removing the boring part of your skull and letting the sky abut your brain. Or like hanging around with the theoretical mathematicians’ guild, getting goofy, drinking wine by the jug, positioning geometries, speaking Greek. Ambitious, fragmented, and thinky in ways most poetry doesn’t even attempt, triangulating by stars including Weil, Carson, Plato, Calvino, and Heidegger, Zwartjes is a new breed of bird in a sky filled with sameness. Part descent, part descant, always vector, in her words, herein you’ll find ‘here / we know there is a mystery greater than beauty.;”
– Ander Monson

Read poetry by Arianne Zwartjes appearing in Terrain.org Issue No. 25.

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By Simmons Buntin, May 24, 2010 3:52 pm

White Egrets
by Derek Walcott
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

Reviewed by Claudia Broman

In White Egrets the action of life becomes poetry and the poems become annals of memory. As the tenth section of “In Italy” relates: “…they are poems we recite to ourselves, metaphors / of our brief glory, a light we cannot avoid…”

It would be a disservice to read Nobel Prize-winner Derek Walcott’s newest book of poetry too quickly.  Dense natural imagery steeped in Caribbean plants, trees, birds, and places contribute to the reader’s understanding of transience and the ongoing tick-tock of time.  Walcott’s subtle rhyming, alliterations, playful approach to hyphenation, and minimal adverbs are all testament to his poetry’s concrete detail and effective metaphor.

Caribbean memories make White Egrets sparkle, and Walcott relates these stories through conceptual frameworks of war, loss, slavery, colonialism, and empire.  Partnered with descriptions of early infatuations, saying good-bye to friends passed on, and experiencing the process of aging, Walcott’s poems prompt readers to consider what intimacy is.

Everyone and everything has a story, even mountain peaks moving in and out of mist.  Walcott takes these stories seriously as he uses the simple beauty of sparrows, egrets, and blackbirds to process the disappointments and joys of growing older.  Walcott calls on his readers to pay attention to the day-to-day, to develop an intimacy with place and experience, and honor our memories.

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Claudia Broman lives in Ashland, Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared in Writing Nature: An Annual of Fine Nature Writing and Drawing.

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By Simmons Buntin, May 11, 2010 11:46 am

Longtime New Urbanism advocate and designer Stephen A. Mouzon has released The Original Green: Unlocking the Mystery of True Sustainability. The book follows from the Original Green website and blog, which among other things discuss designing places in the context of sustainability. It is published by the Guild Foundation Press.

The Original Green is about “the sustainability our ancestors knew by heart. Originally (before the Thermostat Age) they had no choice but to build green, otherwise people would not survive very long. The Original Green aggregates and distributes the wisdom of sustainability through the operating system of living traditions, producing sustainable places in which it is meaningful to build sustainable buildings. Original Green sustainability is common-sense and plain-spoken, meaning ‘keeping things going in a healthy way long into an uncertain future.’ Sustainable places should be nourishable because if you cannot eat there, you cannot live there. They should be accessible because we need many ways to get around, especially walking and biking because those methods do not require fuel. They should be serviceable because we need to be able to get the basic services of life within walking distance. We also should be able to make a living where we are living if we choose to. They should be securable against rough spots in the uncertain future because if there is too much fear, the people will leave. Sustainable buildings should be lovable because if they cannot be loved, they will not last. They should be durable because if they cannot endure, they are not sustainable. The should be flexible because if they endure, they will need to be used for many uses over the centuries. They should be frugal because energy and resource hogs cannot be sustained in a healthy way long into an uncertain future.”

The book is divided into four parts: What’s the Problem? (The Top 10 Problems with Our Current Green Efforts), What Can We Do? (The Top 10 Better Ways of Being Green), What’s the Plan? (The 8 Foundations of Sustainable Places & Buildings), and What Can I Do? (The Top 10 Things You can Do to be Green). It begins with an introduction by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Additionally, the 245 images in the book will be made available  on Mouzon’s Zenfolio site for download and use in presentations and the like.

With so much rhetoric on “green” and “sustainability,” narrow your focus and chances for success by picking up a copy of The Original Green. Learn more at www.originalgreen.org.

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By Simmons Buntin, April 16, 2010 1:28 pm

Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town
by Susan Hand Shetterly
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2010

By Claudia Broman

Along Maine’s coast there is a rural place where plants, animals, and people make up a community, where town flows into wild places, and where what is wild comes to town.  In Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town, Susan Hand Shetterly shares a chronology of personal essays that depict experiences in that rugged place.

What is most striking about Settled in the Wild is Shetterly’s skill in describing community.  The people and wildness around her home are depicted in ways that demonstrate a way of life; even after two readings I could not find a single instance of anthropomorphism.  While each person and each creature is given the space to be their own, these individuals also contribute to an evolving system – a holistic way of communicating and existing with one another.

Shetterly marks time through the interactions she has with others, whether living in a rustic cabin with her husband and children, discovering a cricket “bite” with her son, rehabilitating and relating to a young raven, or appreciating a dead pine in a field.  Shetterly honors her revealed past through the equal attention she pays to the beautiful and the ugly.

The care with which Settled in the Wild is written is testament to the concern Shetterly has for place.  Her essays inspire consideration of what relationships exist in our own communities, what access to wildness we have, and how compassion can better connect us to the places where we live.  The essay collection is Shetterly’s first in 20 years, and it’s well worth the time to read.

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Claudia Broman lives in Ashland, Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared in Writing Nature: An Annual of Fine Nature Writing and Drawing.

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By Simmons Buntin, February 16, 2010 4:07 pm

The Chain Letter of the Soul: New and Selected Poems
by Bill Holm
Milkweed Editions, 2009

By Claudia Broman

Death eventually comes knocking, but before it does, a person might as well pass the time writing poetry. Bill Holm implies as much in “Ars Poetica,” one of his many until-now-unpublished poems included in The Chain Letter of the Soul, printed and posthumously distributed by Milkweed Editions in October 2009 after Holm passed away unexpectedly earlier that year from pneumonia.

Along with new work by Holm, The Chain Letter of the Soul recounts treasures from some of his previous works, The Dead Get By With Everything, Boxelder Bug Variations, and Playing the Black Piano. The book itself is named after a phrase in an application Holm made to the McKnight Foundation to support the time he spent crafting his final batch of new poems: “I have written and intend to continue until someone among you takes up the happy work of keeping the chain letter of the soul moving along into whatever future will come.”

Serendipitous and poignant, many of the poems track Holm’s own emotional negotiation of life, death, and infinity. Through images steeped in landscape, people, wildlife, technology, and music, he questions why death is difficult to accept, what mundane day-to-day moments can teach, and what it means to be human. Take the outset of one of the last poems he wrote, “I Began the Day in My Sixty-Fifth Year,” in which Holm says he asks “himself questions that nobody else has bothered to ask.” By sharing these intimate exchanges with readers, Holm seems to have understood – even if intuitively – how his creativity would continue to resonate much farther than his own abruptly ended life.

The Chain Letter of the Soul is an appropriate entry point for those unfamiliar with Holm, and it offers touching closure for readers already acquainted with his work. The book holds nearly 100 previously unreleased poems, well worth the investment, even though the end of the “Storm Coming to Seattle” section seemed a bit rushed. Please consider The Chain Letter of the Soul as highly recommended and especially so while enjoyed aloud with Mozart or Beethoven, preferably performed on piano, playing in the background.

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Claudia Broman lives in Ashland, Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared in Writing Nature: An Annual of Fine Nature Writing and Drawing.

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By Simmons Buntin, February 2, 2010 8:54 pm

Telling it Real: The Best of Pilgrimage Magazine 2003-2008
Edited by Peter Anderson
Pilgrimage Press, 2009

In the world of environmental literature, there are only a handful of steadfast publications — those you know you can turn to for excellent literary work in poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, as well as enticing artwork. They work in part because of the strength of the editing team, in part because of the array of contributors, and in part because they speak to place. Pilgrimage Magazine, a small journal located in Colorado, is one such journal.

“I believe in the power of stories,” says former Pilgrimage editor Peter Anderson, “stories from the world’s great wisdom traditions; stories that help us to know home and place; stories that speak to the social justice issues of our time; stories that invite reflection; stories that can open, heal, and empower us; the kinds of stories that once led poet Robert Bly to describe Pilgrimage as ‘one of the finest journals in America.’”

Anderson’s last move before stepping back from his editing role at Pilgrimage was to assemble Telling it Real: The Best of Pilgrimage Magazine 2003-2008, and as you might imagine the collection sings. (Disclaimer: Terrain.org editor Simmons B. Buntin has an essay in the collection, “Ben’s Bells,” so he’s biased — but if you spend any time at all with this collection, you’ll acknowledge his bias is right on.)

Telling it Real is introduced by Peter Anderson and then divided into four sections: Story, Place, Spirit, and Witness. At first, you might think: Well, where are all the leading environmental writers? There’s no Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, or Alison Hawthorne Deming, for example. The writers mostly represent the American Southwest, and they represent it beautifully. They are, perhaps, lesser-known, and yet their work — like the anthology itself — is strong and image-filled and built on a passion for and sturdy relationship with the natural world. They include Kim Stafford, Rick Kempa, Pamela Uschuk, William Pitt Root, Reyes Garcia, Maria Melendez, William Stimson, and others.

Telling it Real can be difficult to locate — it’s not on Amazon.com, for example. But you can get it right here:

http://www.pilgrimagepress.org/telling-it-real.html

And we recommend you do.

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By Simmons Buntin, January 18, 2010 6:48 pm

Animal Logic, by Richard Barnes

Animal Logic
by Richard Barnes
with contributions by Susan Yelavich, Jonathan Rosen, and Mark Strand
Princeton Architectural Press, 2009

A buffalo stands horns to head with a man who is calmly vacuuming the snow-covered plains beneath its feet. A herd of plastic-wrapped zebras surrounds a giraffe, while a man on scaffolding above them paints a lovely trompe l’oeil sky. Photographer Richard Barnes has spent more than ten years documenting the way we assemble, contain, and catalog the natural world. His behind-the-scenes photographs are haunting reminders that there is nothing natural about a natural history museum.

Animal Logic, Barnes’s first monograph, collects four related species of his photographic work that touch on themes relevant to science, history, archaeology, and architecture. Through his lens sights and objects normally hidden from public view — half-installed dioramas, partially wrapped specimens, anatomical models, exploded skulls, and taxidermied animals in shipping crates — take on a strange beauty. Barnes peels back layers of artifice to reveal the tangle of artistry, craftsmanship, and curatorial decisions inside every lifelike diorama and meticulously arranged glass case. Animal Logic investigates both the human desire to construct artificial worlds for “the wild” and the haunting and poignant worlds the real wild constructs. Barnes’s camera freezes migrating starlings to reveal the visual poetry hidden inside their dense formations. His extraordinary photographs of birds’ nests constructed from detritus — string, plastic, milkweed, tinsel, hair, dental floss, pine needles — sculpturally embody our often complicated relationship with nature.

Animal Logic presents more than 120 of Barnes’s photographs and features texts by Jonathan Rosen of the New York Times, former poet laureate Mark Strand, and curator Susan Yelavich that explore the themes that emerge from Barnes’s unique body of work.

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Animal Logic will be fully reviewed in the forthcoming issue of Terrain.org, “Virtually There,” publishing in mid-March.

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By Simmons Buntin, November 25, 2009 7:58 pm

Rope
by Alison Hawthorne Deming
Penguin Poets (Penguin Books), 2009

From the publisher:

Alison Hawthorne Deming’s fourth collection of poems follows the paths of imagination into meditations on salt, love, Hurricane Katrina, Greek myth, an experimental forest, and the search for extraterrestrial life. These disparate interests are linked by the poet’s faith in art as an instrument for creating meaning, beauty, and continuity — virtues diminished by the velocity and violence of our historical moment. The final long poem, “The Flight,” inspired by the inclusive poems of A.R. Ammons, is a 21st century epic poised on the verge or our discovering life beyond Earth.

Quoth Christopher Cokinos, editor of Isotope and writer of poetry and prose:

“Alison Deming seems in this book like a poetic delta in which run the rivers of Walt Whitman, Muriel Rukeyser, May Swenson, and Frank O’Hara. This book pitches into chant, slides into talk, candles the self and finds the solitary paths we’re all on. ‘Mercy was a skill my hands would have to learn,’ she says — and poetry this fine is a form of mercy too, I think, an act of compassion, a gift.”

Sample poems (with audio):

Read (and listen to Alison Deming read) three poems from Rope also in the current issue of Terrain.org:

“Pandora on Prozac”
“Specimens Collected at the Clearcut”
“Glooscap in Wolfville”

Terrain.org micro review:

As the old adage goes, we live in interesting times — we always do, of course, and yet doesn’t it seem that with technology’s exponential growth, global climate change, globalization in general, and the profusion of literature and art that in fact we do live in the most interesting of times?  Literature and art, in fact, may be the best indicators, and if so, then Alison Deming’s newest collection of poems, Rope, is a bellwether.

Rope not only brings together an amazing array of topics — the publisher’s summary above points those out — but weaves those topics into politics, passion, and perspective wholly uniqe and yet universal. Folks who have read Deming’s poetry (or prose) know of her curiosity for and allegiance to the workings of our natural world, and beyond. What makes Rope so delightful, and so important, is how Deming crafts that curiosity: there’s both caution and candor, verve and nuance — always elegant, often pointed.

I think this is particularly true with Deming’s longer poems — “Definition of Disaster,” which takes a sort of artist/scientist systems approach to the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina; “The Andrews Forest Quintet,” a series of five poems written while at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest; and perhaps most surprisingly (and stunningly) “Works and Days,” a 45-part prose poem that ranges as only a true artist’s mind can.

The worry with such a far-ranging collection is that it could come across as scattershot — too much of everything, not enough of anything. But that’s not the case with Rope, because even the shorter poems fit like a cog into the larger system of the book. And the longer poems help bound the overall set, so that reading Rope is like following a pathway that meanders but maintains direction. The direction is not just forward but up — the mountains, the sky, the stars.

If we live in interesting times — and we certainly do — then Rope is a worthy and essential guide.