Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (Hardcover bog) (2009) (2024)

Jacket Description/Flap:Black Nature is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated. Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry--anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild. Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. This collection features major writers, such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson, as well as newer talents, such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements. Black Nature brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole. Review Quotes:"Black Nature expands the horizon of black poetry from the frequently anthologized themes of blues, social commentary, and urban pastoral and demonstrates that black is also green, a theme consonant with the twenty-first century." -- Robert Chrisman "Editor-in-Chief, The Black Scholar"Review Quotes:"The timing could not be better for such a comprehensive look at what black poets have contributed to our understanding of nature. What excites about this anthology is that it is not only the richest and most comprehensive collection of poems by black poets I have read, it is the richest and most comprehensive collection of poems about nature that -- Alison Hawthorne Deming "author of Rope"Review Quotes:"Black Nature is the most exciting anthology of poetry I've read in years. In part this reflects the superb quality and remarkable range of Camille Dungy's selections. . . . This collection will quickly become essential reading for poets and scholars, as well as for courses on American poetry and the literature of nature." -- John Elder "author of Reading the Mountains of Home"Review Quotes:"With extraordinary insight and substantial creative vision the rich synthesis of this anthology offers a strikingly original contour to the seasons of Black poets and poetry. The critical wisdom accumulated here is as important as the beautifully structured cycles that Dungy uses as landscaped categories to contain these important poems. The methodology here is as graceful as it is rigorously intelligent. Dungy's anthology is a major contribution to twenty-first century Black Studies." -- Karla FC Holloway "author of BookMarks: Reading in Black and White--A Memoir"Review Quotes:"Dungy has compiled what might have taken a lifetime to assemble, yet here it is at this moment when our culture is assessing both its relationship to the natural world and its relationship with its black citizens. The timing could not be better for such a comprehensive look at what black poets have contributed to our understanding of nature. What excites about this anthology is that it is not only the richest and most comprehensive collection of poems by black poets I have read, it is the richest and most comprehensive collection of poems about nature that I have read. I believe the book should be widely read, taught, and talked about."--Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of "Rope"Review Quotes:""Black Nature" is the most exciting anthology of poetry I've read in years. In part this reflects the superb quality and remarkable range of Camille Dungy's selections. But it also comes from her decision to organize the book's contents into ten thematic "cycles" rather than chronologically. Each of the sections responds distinctively and dramatically to Lucille Clifton's question with which Dungy frames the entire volume: "why/is there under that poem always/ an other poem?" This collection will quickly become essential reading for poets and scholars, as well as for courses on American poetry and the literature of nature."--John Elder, author of "Reading the Mountains of Home"Review Quotes:"With extraordinary insight and substantial creative vision the rich synthesis of this anthology offers a strikingly original contour to the seasons of black poets and poetry. The critical wisdom accumulated here is as important as the beautifully structured cycles that Dungy uses as landscaped categories to contain these important poems. The methodology here is as graceful as it is rigorously intelligent. Dungy's anthology is a major contribution to twenty-first century Black Studies."--Karla FC Holloway, author of "BookMarks: Reading in Black and White--A Memoir"Review Quotes:"Camille Dungy believes that white and black poets look differently at nature, with whites primarily noticing its beauty and blacks seeing its harshness. The view, Dungy says, is intensified by the black experience of slavery. An edgy mix of pastoral and political, her anthology, "Black Nature", testifies to her point.""--Baltimore Sun"Review Quotes:"Camille Dungy's anthology, "Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry", offers a fresh new vision of the African American poetic canon. In eliciting black poems that redefine the Western tradition of nature poetry, she has provided a new configuration for African American poetry, one that is postmodern and neo-pastoralist. "Black Nature" expands the horizon of black poetry from the frequently anthologized themes of blues, social commentary, and urban pastoral and demonstrates that black is also green, a theme consonant with the twenty-first century. Publishing many young poets writing since the post Black Arts Movement, Dungy's "Black Nature" achieves a contemporary emphasis. It is ideal for introductory and advanced African American literature courses."--Robert Chrisman, Editor-in-Chief, "The Black Scholar"Review Quotes:"No pleasures are more aesthetic than poetry and nature, so it is only natural that the two should unite. Editor Dungy here merges the worlds in a satisfying compilation that features over 100 poems by 93 African American poets, including celebrated writers June Jordan and Yusef Komunyakaa as well as newer artists like Remica L. Bingham and Indigo Moor.""--Library Journal"Review Quotes:"Just as nature is too often defined as wilderness when, in fact, nature is everywhere we are, our nature poetry is too often defined by Anglo-American perspectives, even though poets of all backgrounds write about the living world... Dungy enlarges our understanding of the nexus between nature and culture, and introduces a 'new way of thinking about nature writing and writing by black Americans.'""--Booklist" (starred review) Biographical Note:Camille T. Dungy is an associate professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. She is the author of two poetry collections, "What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison" and "Suck on the Marrow," and has helped edit two other poetry anthologies. Review Quotes:"One of the few anthologies that can be picked up and read like a novel cover to cover without metaphor overload. "Black Nature" is well thought out, well edited, and timed."--"Phati'tude Literary Magazine"Table of Contents:Acknowledgments xvii Introduction: The Nature of African American PoetryCamille T. Dungy xix Cycle One: Just Looking Ed Roberson "We Must Be Careful" 3Lucille Clifton "the earth is a living thing" 6Al Young "The Mountains of California: Part I" 7G. E. Patterson "The Mountain Road Ends Here" 8June Jordan "Queen Anne's Lace" 9George Moses Horton "On Summer" 10Nikki Giovanni "The Yellow Jacket" 12Yusef Komunyakaa "Eclogue at Twilight" 14Marilyn Nelson "Ruellia Noctifl ora" 16Rita Dove "Evening Primrose" 18Robert Hayden "The Night-Blooming Cereus" 19George Marion McClellan "A September Night" 22Thylias Moss "Sweet Enough Ocean, Cotton" 23Helene Johnson "Metamorphism" 25Toni Wynn "a brown girl's nature poem: provincetown" 26Gerald Barrax Sr. "What More?" 27Ed Roberson "be careful" 29Rachel Eliza Griths "Watching Blackbirds Turn to Ghosts" 30Alvin Aubert "If Winter Comes, Can Spring?" 32Evie Shockley "31 words * prose poems [#12]" 33 Cycle Two: Nature, Be with Us Ravi Howard "We Are Not Strangers Here" 37James A. Emanuel "For a Farmer" 39Gerald Barrax Sr. "To Waste at Trees" 40Carl Phillips "White Dog" 41Evie Shockley "you must walk this lonesome" 42Cyrus Cassells "Down from the Houses of Magic" 43George Marion McClellan "The Ephemera" 49Ruth Ellen Kocher "Sleepwalker on the Mountain" 50Richard Wright #543 51Mark McMorris "Aphrodite of Economy" 52Marilyn Nelson "Arachis Hypogaea" 53Anthony Walton "In the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge, Thinking of Rachel Carson" 54Camille T. Dungy "Language" 55June Jordan "For Alice Walker (a summertime tanka)" 56Lucille Clifton "generations" 57Yusef Komunyakaa "Work" 58Ross Gay "Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be" 60Sterling Brown "To a Certain Lady, in Her Garden" 63Ed Roberson "Urban Nature" 65Reginald Shepherd "September Songs" 66 Cycle Three: Dirt on Our Hands Richard Wright from 12 Million Black Voices 71Anne Spencer "Another April" 74Gerald Barrax Sr. "Barriers" 75Lenard D. Moore "A Young Peaco*ck" 76Major Jackson "Urban Renewal: XIII" 77Audre Lorde "The Bees" 78Anthony Walton "Carrion" 80June Jordan "look at the blackbird fall" 82Wanda Coleman "Flight of the California Condor" 83Camille T. Dungy "Since Everyone Can Never Be Safe" 87Patricia Smith "Won't Be But a Minute" 90Michael S. Harper "Called" 91Jean Toomer "Harvest Song" 93Arna Bontemps "A Black Man Talks of Reaping" 95Melvin Dixon "Wood and Rain" 96Claude McKay "Joy in the Woods" 97Margaret Walker "Sorrow Home" 99Honoree Fanonne Je?ers "Blues Aubade (or, Revision of the Lean, Post-Modernist Pastorale)" 100Ed Roberson "romance" 102Alice Dunbar-Nelson "April Is on the Way" 103 Cycle Four: Pests, People Too C. S. Giscombe "Boll Weevils, Coyotes, and the Color of Nuisance" 109Amber Flora Thomas "Miscarriage in October with Ladybugs" 114Gregory Pardlo "Man Reading in Bed by a Window with Bugs" 116Major Jackson "Pest" 117Tim Seibles "Ambition II: Mosquito in the Mist" 119Richard Wright #459 122Thomas Sayers Ellis "The Market" 123Tara Betts "For Those Who Need a True Story" 124Lenard D. Moore "Postcard to an Ecologist" 126C. S. Giscombe "Nature Boy" 127Robert Hayden "A Plague of Starlings" 128Janice N. Harrington "O Believer" 130Audre Lorde "The Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival of Roaches" 132Kwame Alexander "Life" 134Kamilah Aisha Moon "What a Snakehead Discovered in a Maryland Pond and a Poet in Corporate America Have in Common" 135Shane Book "The Lost Conquistador" 137Lucille Clifton "the beginning of the end of the world" 141Natasha Trethewey "Carpenter Bee" 142Yusef Komunyakaa "Yellowjackets" 144 Cycle Five: Forsaken of the Earth Alice Walker "The Flowers" 147Phillis Wheatley "On Imagination" 149Nikki Giovanni "For Saundra" 151G. E. Patterson "The Natural World" 153Langston Hughes "Lament for Dark Peoples" 154Anne Spencer "White Things" 155Rita Dove "Parsley" 156Paul Laurence Dunbar "The Haunted Oak" 159Albery Whitman from Rape of Florida, Canto I 162Douglas Kearney "Swimchant of nigg*r Mer-Folk (An Aquaboogie Set in Lapis)" 166Clarence Major "Water usa" 167Major Jackson "Migration" 168Ruth Ellen Kocher "February Leaving" 169Ed Roberson "blue horses" 171Gwendolyn Brooks "Sick Man Looks at Flowers" 172Arna Bontemps "Prodigal" 173Cynthia Parker-Ohene "potters' field" 174Natasha Trethewey "Monument" 175 Cycle Six: Disasters, Natural and Other Mona Lisa Saloy "Disasters, Nature, and Poetry" 179Askia M. Toure "Floodtide" 184Sterling Brown "Children of the Mississippi" 188James A. Emanuel "Emmett Till" 191devorah major "sign post" 192Audre Lorde "Song" 193G. E. Patterson "The Sacred History of the Earth" 195Yusef Komunyakaa "A Greenness Taller Than Gods" 196Patricia Spears Jones "San Francisco, Spring 1986" 197Carl Phillips "The Cure" 199Natasha Trethewey "Liturgy" 201Jean Toomer "Reapers" 203Ishmael Reed "Earthquake Blues" 204Amber Flora Thomas "Erasure" 206Douglas Kearney "Floodsong 2: Water Moccasin's Spiritual" 208Anne Spencer "Requiem" 210Robert Hayden "Ice Storm" 211 Cycle Seven: Talk of the Animals Sean Hill "A Shepherd's Tale" 215Jean Toomer "Beehive" 218Rachel Eliza Griffiths "Black-and-White Dusk at Limantour Beach" 219Paul Laurence Dunbar "Sympathy" 221Melvin B. Tolson "The Sea-Turtle and the Shark" 222Richard Wright #175 224Harryette Mullen "European Folk Tale Variant" 225Wendy S. Walters "Man Raised as Chicken" 226C. S. Giscombe "Far" 227Shara McCallum "The Spider Speaks" 228Cyrus Cassells "The Hummingbird" 229Tim Seibles "The Herd" 230Cornelius Eady "Speed" 233Ishmael Reed "Points of View" 234Wanda Coleman "Requiem for a Nest" 235Clarence Major "Surfaces and Masks: XXX" 236Toi Derricotte "The Minks" 237Janice N. Harrington "Possum" 239Afaa Michael Weaver "The Appaloosa" 244G. E. Patterson "April Lyric / All I Know Is" 245 Cycle Eight: What the Land Remembers Honoree Fanonne Je?ers "April in Eatonton" 249Robert Hayden "Locus" 252Myronn Hardy "Jaguaripe" 254Janice N. Harrington "What There Was" 256Frank X Walker "Wind Talker" 258Lucille Clifton "mulberry fi elds" 260E. Ethelbert Miller "I Am Black and the Trees Are Green" 261Amaud Jamaul Johnson "The Maple Remains" 262Douglas Kearney "Tallahatchie Lullabye, Baby" 264June Jordan "Out in the Country of My Country" 265Rita Dove "Three Days of Forest, a River, Free" 266Claudia Rankine "American Light" 267C. S. Giscombe "Look Ahead, Look South: the future" 269Margaret Walker "Southern Song" 270Ed Roberson "Wave" 271Evie Shockley "her table mountain" 272Sherley Anne Williams from "Juneteenth: The Bicentennial Poem" 274Indigo Moor "Tap-Root" 276Marilyn Nelson "Last Talk with Jim Hardwick" 278Michael S. Harper "History as Apple Tree" 279 Cycle Nine: Growing Out of This Land Camille T. Dungy "Writing Home" 283Richard Wright #559 286Yusef Komunyakaa "The Millpond" 287Sean Hill "Seven Pastorals at Sixteen" 290Janice N. Harrington "Before a Screen Door" 293Indigo Moor "Pull" 295C. S. Giscombe "Two Directions" 297Marilyn Nelson "My Grandfather Walks in the Woods" 298Stephanie Pruitt "Mississippi Gardens" 300Gerald Barrax Sr. "I Called Them Trees" 301Wanda Coleman "Beaches. Why I Don't Care for Them" 303Ruth Ellen Kocher "At 57, My Father Learns to Grow Things" 305Gregory Pardlo "Suburban Noir" 306June Jordan "Letter to the Local Police" 307Frank X Walker "Homeopathic" 309Terrance Hayes "Root" 310Audre Lorde "What My Child Learns of the Sea" 312Remica L. Bingham "The Ritual of Season" 313Mark McMorris "More Than Once in Caves" 315Al Young "Pachuta, Mississippi / A Memoir" 317 Cycle Ten: Comes Always Spring Marilyn Nelson "First Skunk of Spring" 321Anne Spencer "[Earth, I Thank You]" 325Sean Hill "Bemidji in Spring" 326Nikki Giovanni "Winter Poem" 328Claude McKay "After the Winter" 329Joanne V. Gabbin "For Alexis" 330Ross Gay "Thank You" 333George Marion McClellan "Spring Dawn" 334James Weldon Johnson "Deep in the Quiet Wood" 335Alice Dunbar-Nelson "Violets" 336Claudia Rankine "The Man. His Bowl. His Raspberries." 337Camille T. Dungy "What to Eat, and What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison" 338Langston Hughes "Earth Song" 342Jessie Redmon Fauset "Rondeau" 343Kendra Hamilton "Southern Living" 344Elizabeth Alexander "Geraniums" 346Margaret Walker "My Mississippi Spring" 347Tim Seibles "Fearless" 348 Credits 351 List of Contributors 361 Index of Authors 379 Index of Titles 383 Publisher Marketing:An anthology of major writers that focuses on nature writing by African American poets. It offers fresh perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics.Review Citations:

Booklist02/01/2010 pg. 18 (EAN9780820332772, Hardcover) - *Starred Review