The poems in this book, which was chosen by Carolyne Wright as the winner of the 2008 Stevens Poetry Book Manuscript Competition, work together as a sequence, exploring the difficult relations of humans and wild nature through a focus on bears of all kinds. They do so, as Wright notes in her foreword, in a great variety of poetic forms, including "narrative free verse, slant-rhyming couplets, prose poems, a pantoum, and even a bear-shaped concrete poem." As Wright also notes, "This is poetry freed from a dependence upon autobiography," focused outward on its subject. That subject, as Wright aptly describes it, "is Ursa, and the literal and figurative territory in which it dwells, a numinous and compelling force in human mythology, and a genus whose every species is endangered because of human encroachment and predation throughout its range." "One must bear up in Bear Country," writes Iowa Review editor David Hamilton, "bear with, bear down as in giving birth, and bear witness, first to our shameful rule over the wild but also to our longing for that wild."
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Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Dana Sonnenschein is a professor of English at Southern Connecticut State University and the author of a previous book of poetry, Natural Forms (Word Press, 2006) and two chapbooks of prose poems, Corvus (Wind, 2003) and No Angels But These (Main Street Rag Press, 2005).
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Haunting,
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This review is from: Bear Country (Paperback)
Bear Country
I just re-read "Adam in the Wilderness" and "Fur Trade," two of the poems in Dana Sonnenschein's amazing collection *Bear Country*. I had to go back for more, the same way we keep going back to haunted houses, or wanting to hear terrible, frightening stories, or pitiful ones. That's where we live, that's where we are. In these poems Sonnenschein mines historic events and a deep knowledge of the natural world. Encounters with the wild, with bears and other people, with the possibility of sudden honest violence, or with the sad, degraded and explosive residue left when wildness is half-tamed and put on display (think P.T. Barnum's dancing bears, dressed in ladies clothes) are Sonnenschein's subject. In these encounters, individual human beings lose. Scalps are loosened, bones broken. But in the Big Encounter, bears lose. Have lost. This collection summons the terror of those encounters, and the sadness and inevitability of the outcome. Read it.
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