Camille T. Dungy

Outside long enough, I lose the contours of my body and become part of something larger.

“A Good Hike”

In the title poem of Camille T. Dungy’s Trophic Cascade (2018), the setting is Yellowstone, but the poem’s rhythmic accretion of imagery puts me at the beach, watching the ocean pound the shore. Line by line, momentum builds in waves. From songbirds and birds-of-prey to new berries on brush, the reintroduction of wolves reconstructs an ecosystem like a river shapes the land, like pregnancy changes a body. A classic example of trophic cascade, the presence of the wolf, a top predator, has a ripple effect on the landscape, surprising even scientists. In the hands of a poet, this subject illuminates even greater truths.

Trophic Cascade

After the reintroduction of gray wolves

to Yellowstone and, as anticipated, their culling

of deer, trees grew beyond the deer stunt

of the mid century. In their up reach

songbirds nested, who scattered

seed for underbrush, and in that cover

warrened snowshoe hare. Weasel and water shrew

returned, also vole, and came soon hawk

and falcon, bald eagle, kestrel, and with them

hawk shadow, falcon shadow. Eagle shade

and kestrel shade haunted newly-berried

runnels where mule deer no longer rummaged, cautious

as they were, now, of being surprised by wolves. Berries

brought bear, while undergrowth and willows, growing

now right down to the river, brought beavers,

who dam. Muskrats came to the dams, and tadpoles.

Came, too, the night song of the fathers

of tadpoles. With water striders, the dark

gray American dipper bobbed in fresh pools

of the river, and fish stayed, and the bear, who

fished, also culled deer fawns and to their kill scraps

came vulture and coyote, long gone in the region

until now, and their scat scattered seed, and more

trees, brush, and berries grew up along the river

that had run straight and so flooded but thus dammed,

compelled to meander, is less prone to overrun. Don’t

you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this

life born from one hungry animal, this whole,

new landscape, the course of the river changed,

I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time

a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same.

“Trophic Cascade” reaches its full potential when Dungy makes her personal revelation at the end. A master of poetic synthesis, she fuses fact, observation, and revelation to offer poetry’s inevitable surprise: motherhood has rewilded her. Having a child has done to her inner landscape what wolves have done to Yellowstone. Making the experience of motherhood a central topic in this collection of nature writing sets Dungy apart from most of the nature-writing tradition. In her powerful parallel of the trophic cascade progression, Dungy becomes new to herself in a fierce and sweeping story of interconnection. It is a poem to be read again and again.

Throughout Dungy’s fourth collection of poetry, motherhood and nature intersect. When I ask her about Trophic Cascade’s natural history, she tells me, “I am never not thinking about nature. Because I don’t understand a way we can be honest about who we are without understanding that we are nature.” In person at poetry readings, Dungy is as generous, attentive, and spirited as she is on paper. Her smile is warm and infectious, and her purple and pink shoe collection reflects her playful whimsy. “I was really caught by the story of the Yellowstone River and so I wrote into it, asking myself, ‘Why does this matter to me?’ My daughter was three and a half at the time. Piece by piece, the poem came together. And it was as much of a revelation to me as it was to the reader.” One of the last things Dungy did to the poem was to push it to the right margin, shifting from the normal way of seeing a poem and anchoring it to the page in a satisfying way. “It just felt right that way,” she says.

While motherhood is a framework for seeing anew, Dungy also explores violence, joy, and environmental degradation. She writes about hiking in the Sierras while newly pregnant, the first time her baby sleeps through the night, and her daughter’s first birthday—intimate moments set to the rhythms of the natural world. In “There are these moments of permission,” she delicately describes how finding time for herself as a new mother is akin to the space between raindrops. Throughout the collection, her environmental imagination is cross-pollinated with gender, race, history, and the ways being an African-American woman brings an extra layer of complication to motherhood. She wonders in “Conspiracy,” for example, if people think she is being “quaintly primitive” by carrying her baby on her back with a brightly patterned African cloth. She wonders if she might be mistaken for her own child’s nanny. As a collection, Trophic Cascade draws a picture of how we protect our young and adapt to life’s challenging conditions while also adjusting to losses and mourning our elders.

“I’ve actually gotten pushback for writing about motherhood,” says Dungy, a professor of poetry at Colorado State University. This resistance comes even in light of her acclaimed body of work. She edited the highly influential Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009) and has written four volumes of poetry, including the sonnet collection What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (2006), Suck on the Marrow (2010), and Smith Blue (2011). Her honors include an American Book Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts in both prose and poetry. Her debut collection of personal essays, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (2017), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. The book centers on the first three years of her daughter’s life and chronicles Dungy’s own journey balancing new motherhood with a demanding career of travel and teaching.

“People sometimes give a patronizing response. ‘Oh, you’re writing about nature?’ and ‘Oh, you’re writing about motherhood?’ as if they are sentimental topics. I have heard that dismissive tone a lot, implying that writing about nature and motherhood is a marginal cottage industry and not a serious literature topic.” As she talks, I recall seeing a spate of recent articles concerning “mom books,” from such publications as Harper’s, Slate, the Paris Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Times, all of which declared, finally and in so many words, that motherhood is a rich life experience worth celebrating and exploring. Despite this welcome, if long-overdue pronouncement, these articles tend to be somewhat problematic themselves—penned by white authors reviewing the work of other white authors. Without poems, essays, and books from brown and black mothers, the “mom book” genre can feel like a monologue on a universal experience instead of a productive conversation.

Choosing to write about motherhood as a black woman can feel, Dungy tells me, like playing into something that has been turned against black mothers. “One of the interesting elements of writing as an African American author alongside the environmental movement is that, historically, we’ve been described as animals in derogatory, violent, and deeply damaging ways. And that dangerous and dominant attempt to animalize black people is something we are always pushing against. In this context, it’s problematic for me to write from this motherhood perspective because I’m saying, ‘Hey, I am a mammal.’ That’s transgressive. The way people have been made into animals against their will for the power of others is problematic.” She pauses and says, “And yet, in writing, it is actually easier for me to think of myself as an animal. I have all these things in common with the greater-than-human world, and the alliances I have with plants and animals can be life-affirming and deeply beneficial.”

Dungy’s bold anthology Black Nature features nearly two hundred poems by black men and women, from eighteenth-century slave Phillis Wheatley to poet laureate Rita Dove. It challenges the notion that the tradition of nature writing is solely grounded in pastoral landscapes and Euro-American perspectives. Black writers, Dungy tells me, were writing even if they weren’t being seen. The voices within the collection show nature as a source of hope with seeds of survival as well as the devastating legacy of slavery and people forced to work the land. As she writes in its introduction, the book’s ten thematically organized sections “are a representative sampling of poems from each major movement in black American poetics as well as the newer poetry of contemporary poets still in the process of publishing their own collections.” Some examples in the anthology show how writers have moved “beyond personal, cultural, and political struggles into spaces of deep appreciation, connection, healing, and peace,” while other voices illustrate a distaste for wilderness. Take her own poem “Language” and contrast it with the tangible anger and injustice in “The Natural World” by G. E. Patterson, which is featured in Black Nature.

Language by Camille T. Dungy

Silence is one part of speech, the war cry

of wind down a mountain pass another.

A stranger’s voice echoing through lonely

valleys, a lover’s voice rising so close

it’s your own tongue: these are keys to cipher,

the way the high hawk’s key unlocks the throat

of the sky and the coyote’s yip knocks

it shut, the way the aspens’ bells conform

to the breeze while the rapid’s drum defines

resistance. Sage speaks with one voice, pinyon

with another. Rock, wind her hand, water

her brush, spells and then scatters her demands.

Some notes tear and pebble our paths. Some notes

gather: the bank we map our lives around.

The Natural World by G. E. Patterson

You got here trees all dappled with sunlight and shit

You got trees green with lots of leaves

You got fruit-bearing trees          made for climbing

good for something.

I got trees too     My trees stainless steel poles

with no flags     My trees streetlights redyellowgreen

glass shattered on the ground

You got birds waking you up in the morning

Birds waking you up in the morning     TweetTweet

ChirpChirp     That’s how it is for y’all

                    mutherfuckers

I got birds too               My birds

loud as jackhammers          My birds

loud as police sirens          My birds

loud as gunfire               My birds

electric gas-powered

My birds          My birds     killers

These kinds of contrasts, from Dungy’s almost pastoral language to Patterson’s young, urban African-American, male perspective, turn Black Nature into a mind-blowing, essential collection every aficionado of this genre should read. It is the definitive volume for appreciating the range and depth of human relationships with the natural world.

“My vision for Black Nature formed at the same moment the ecopoetics movement was flourishing,” Dungy says. “Ecopoetics has distanced itself from the ways we have come to understand ‘nature poetry’ and the glorification of some beautiful space or the sense of ‘I climbed the mountain and found myself.’ It frequently talks about the degradation of the land and eco-justice questions, which are paired with other justice movements. Ecopoetics complicates our interconnection. It brings the Anthropocene into the ways we observe the non-human world. And therefore poetry that brings in economic and personal history while bringing the person into the nature—there is more space for that in ecopoetics. Black Nature landed at just the right time.”

Dungy’s beautiful, timely, and approachable writing awakens an inclusive sense of belonging in the world. What does she want people to get out of her poems? “Beauty and the heightened craft that comes from looking at everyday objects with respect,” she tells me. “There is, for example, a difference between the crocheting we do for scarves versus for doilies. And I want people to look at that extra careful needlework that brings it from an everyday piece of needlework to heightened craft. I want people to enjoy my poems as everyday language but also to experience the extra care.”

More Poetry

Jane Clarke

“Writing is such a curious mixture of the conscious and unconscious,” Irish poet Jane Clark told me, “that it’s hard to fully explain either the compulsion or the process.” Clarke is the author of The River (2015), All the Way Home (2019), and When the Tree Falls (2019)—collections of poems distilled to their essence, reticent and intimate, subtle and vivid. With a farming and psychotherapy background, Clarke feels life on the farm where she grew up gave her the imagery and language best attuned to her internal world. “I didn’t choose to write ‘nature poetry,’ rather it chose me. There was no other way for me to express what I wanted and needed to express.” Finely crafted images of natural life—drystone walls, Rhode Island Red chickens, the smell of burnt barley—are a backdrop in The River to convey the beauty and brutality of farming, the memories of parents, and the life of land and animals.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

“Poetry offers an attention to the world, to beauty, and to love,” writes Nezhukumatathil. “I think that’s a form of activism: inviting people in this hurting world to see animals and nature and human relationships differently, and to take refuge in beauty.” Drawing upon her Filipina and Malayali Indian background, Nezhukumatathil has written numerous award-winning poetry collections, including Oceanic (2018), Lucky Fish (2011), At the Drive-in Volcano (2007), and Miracle Fruit (2003). Her poetry is playful and fun to read aloud. It tastes like ripe fruit on the tongue—and is filled with lush landscapes. With poet Ross Gay, she co-wrote the epistolary chapbook, Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens (2014). She is also poetry editor at Orion, a leading magazine focused on nature, culture, and the environment.

Jenny Johnson

Jenny Johnson’s debut poetry collection, In Full Velvet (2017), explores luxurious liminal moments of life through imagery of the natural world. An important contribution to contemporary lesbian literature, Johnson’s work expands our understanding of community, diversity, identity, and the body in queer landscapes. In “Aria,” as Aretha Franklin sings “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman,” Johnson wonders what is natural to transgender bodies. In “The Bus Ride,” she captures desire and attraction: “When she turns from the window and sees me / she is as lovely as a thrush seeing for the first time all sides of the sky. / Let this be a ballet without intermission: the grace of this ride beside her / on the green vinyl, soft thunderclaps in the quarry. / Let me be her afternoon jay, hot silo, red shale crumbling—.” For more on the natural world by lesbian authors, Johnson herself recommends Strange as This Weather Has Been (2007) by Ann Pancake, Bestiary (2016) by Donika Kelly, Rocket Fantastic (2017) by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and Last Psalm at Sea Level (2014) by Meg Day.