Urban Nature: Poems About Wildlife in the City [Paperback]

Laure-Anne Bosselaar (Author), Emily Hiestand (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 27, 2000

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 engines of human desire. Urban Nature captures the many faces of wildness in the city with poems by more than 130 emerging and recognized poets. Rather than just lamenting the loss of paradise, these poems celebrate nature's resiliency. They memorialize a salamander's last stand in a parking lot, link the cosmos to the consumer ethos ("The Pleiades / you could probably get downtown"), evoke horses galloping between skyscrapers, and track geological time in a pothole.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

"I do not do nature," insists Peter E. Murphy; " give me a home/ without buffalo and cows/ and trees that annoy/ with their loud branches/ scratching the panes/ of my well-insulated house." Once the city was a stay against nature, but more recently it has become a threat to it. Still, "urban nature" is not the oxymoron you might at first think. The poems in this volume, by writers unknown and established, remind us of the ginkgoes, pigeons, squirrels, and rivers. But there is much more: Lewis Hyde recalls the goldfish gotten at Woolworth's for a penny, then flushed away when they were no longer amusing, only to live on in the murky rivers of urban legends. Len Roberts recalls a regular spring ritual: "She's out there again with her five-cent/ packages of seeds." Whether it is watching ants play soccer in Central Park (Anthony Piccione), dreaming of an amorous giant roach (Martin Espada), or observing a red salamander looking for love in the wrong placeDthis time in a video store parking lot (Mark DeFoe), nature has subtly encroached on our hard urban paradise. The city is concrete and glass, jazz, noisy child-play, and traffic. Finally, though, people are beginning to see, to understand, the delicate balance. Except, perhaps, Murphy: "How does anything get/ done when you're out/ there picking flowers,/ petting dogs, staring/ at stars that clutter/ the night sky?" Highly enjoyableDand recommended.DLouis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The city is considered nature's opposite, but humankind is as much a part of nature as any other earthly species, and cities are as vital and natural as coral reefs and termite mounds. Emily Hiestand, poetry editor of Orion magazine, crystallizes this recognition in her sagacious and lyrical introduction to this pathfinding anthology, and editor Bosselaar presents poems of supple wit, grace, and acuity by more than 130 poets that marvel at nature's myriad improvisations in the realm of concrete, brick, glass, steel, and automobiles. Metaphors unite the human made and the natural with great finesse in the poems of Diane Ackerman, Gary Snyder, Amy Clampitt, Edward Hirsch, and Gerald Stern, and in every urban scene, life abounds. Sterling Plumpp writes of pigeons; Stuart Dybek discovers a swatch of forgotten wildness behind a billboard; and Linda Hogan sees the heavens on the paved earth: "the potholes are full / of light and stars, the moon's many faces." Bosselaar's anthology is a resonant testament to life's irrepressibility. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions; 1st edition (June 27, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571314105
• ISBN-13: 978-1571314109
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #834,315 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Urban Nature: An Oxymoron?, February 2, 2001

By 

Ken Ingham "Tree Lover" (Garrett Park, MD United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Urban Nature: Poems About Wildlife in the City (Paperback)

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 handouts, investigating the wonders of gum. This book is not just about literary cities like NY, SF and LA but also about Chicago, Detroit, Phoenix, St Louis, Duluth and others - how they are and how they used to be. Its about animals and dreams, childhood memories of growing-up places in a time when urban nature was less of an oxymoron, before so much of it had been squeezed out. Its about pollution (even the snowflakes stink), empty lots and potholes (earth breathing through the streets), about escaping to the park, the zoo, the botanical garden, the college campus or the outskirts of town, or merely looking out the window like that couple that made love in the afternoon thirty stories up, then watched a peregrine swoop past their room as if delivering a message from the gods.

After several readings I had connected on a personal level with many of the poems, discovered some poets that I want to read more of, and learned that in some ways, nature is even more poignant when projected against a cityscape.

Note: this review also appeared in the Autubon Naturalist News, Feb 2001

4.0 out of 5 stars A strong, fun collection, November 2, 2008

By 

Scott Woods (Columbus, Ohio United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Urban Nature: Poems About Wildlife in the City (Paperback)

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.