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By Claudia Broman, January 9, 2011 1:17 pm

Naked In Eden: My Adventure and Awakening in the Australian Rainforest
by Robin Easton

Health Communications, September 2010

Reviewed by Claudia Broman

In this adventure-laden memoir, Robin Easton shares a period of her life when she traveled to Australia, in her 20-somethings, lived off the grid in a remote rainforest, and began to understand her connection to the deadly and mysterious world around her.

Easton meets and marries a native Australian and together they decide to travel to the Daintree Rainforest and live bare-bones beyond the scope of modern convenience. Sleeping in tents, on cots, in the back of a truck, and on the ground next to a crocodile-filled river, the couple slowly develop a natural rhythm and find their place among poisonous snakes, tentacled jellyfish, and paralyzing ticks.

Over the course of Naked in Eden, Easton makes observations about herself as a person, and ultimately overcomes what she calls her “autistic state.” Through regular interactions with rocks, trees, and rain, Easton tells the story of how, by developing awareness of her rainforest home, she learned to find her way as a member of what she now describes as a loving community.

Naked In Eden is accessibly written and its deep, almost mystical intensity at times, encourages readers to keep turning pages – an indication of how Easton grew mentally, physically, and spiritually, facing and embracing her rainforest fears throughout her time in the Daintree.

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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 Claudia Broman, January 3, 2011 7:35 am

Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher
by Frederick L. Kirschenmann

Edited by Constance L. Falk
The University Press of Kentucky, 2010

Reviewed by Claudia Broman

Frederick Kirschenmann’s essay collection, informed by the likes of Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, Aldo Leopold, Bill McKibben, and Barbara Kingsolver, encourages readers to develop an integrated appreciation of the land and communities on which we all depend.

Kirschenmann is a distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Ames, Iowa, and is president of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture at Pocantico Hills, New York. His essays are grouped into three sections, marking personal philosophical shifts in desire for maximum agricultural potential, optimum potential, and finally for resilient agriculture.

The first part of Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher delves into the experience of farming and the lessons Kirschenmann drew from moving back to a 3,000-acre family farm in North Dakota. Upon arrival, the author worked to transition the farm from conventional methods to organic practices.

From there, the author moves readers into the implications of industrial farming and food production, culminating in a consideration of the future: alternatives to mainstream agricultural practices, focusing on renewal and resilience, and shifting to an idea of farmers and humanity being part of nature rather than separate from it.

Throughout the book, Kirschenmann shares his own journey in what he calls fostering “an ecological conscience.” Such a conscience is essential to generating a solid land ethic, is grounded in the appreciation of healthy soil, and relies on understanding relationships between environmental conditions and the experience of humanity.

Cultivating an Ecological Conscience involves a consideration of the sublime, an anticipation of what could be, and a view of long-term rather than short-term consequence. With a focus on local possibility, rather than global, Kirschenmann celebrates small- and middle-scale farmers and calls on readers to create new narratives of what agriculture is and could become.

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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 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, 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, 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.