A Bread Loaf Anthology
Edited by Robert Pack & Jay Parini
University Press of New England/Middlebury College Press, 1993
"How do poets, in this last decade of the twentieth century, respond to the destruction of nature?" asks Jay Parini in the introduction to the newest Bread Loaf Anthology. Parini and co-editor Robert Pack have gathered 83 of America's most accomplished poets and nearly 250 of their poems to explore this question. Composed over the past decade, a time when the contamination of the planet has become an inescapable reality, these poems represent a wide array of styles and a broad range of responses to the question of what constitutes "nature poetry. "
"What we find," writes Parini, "is that the traditions of nature poetry continue to serve us well, even as we willfully misread them." Contemporary poets have assimilated and reformulated the concerns and conceits of traditional nature poetry. Rather than reject a rich legacy, they have engaged it in debate, forging a new poetic response to nature that is appropriate to our era. "Nature is no longer the rustic retreat of the Wordsworthian poet in flight from 'false refinements,"' he argues; "nature is now a pressing political question, a question of survival. "
In a concluding critical essay, Robert Pack offers a reflective overview of the traditions of nature poetry in the West, placing the anthology in a larger historical and critical context.
Jay Parini
Introduction
Sandra Alcosser
What Makes the Grizzlies Dance
Glory Monster
Woodpecker
Approaching August
Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrel
Pamela Alexander
First Relations
Antichromatic
Julia Alvarez
On a Hill above Your House Cows
A. R. Ammons
Standing Light Up
Looking Way Off
Somers Point
First Cold
White Echo
David Baker
Sex
The Yard
The Deer
Peter Balakian
Idyll
The Back Yard
Ocean
Marvin Bell
An Old Trembling
Eastern Long Island
Pulsations
Further Pulsations
Stephen Berg
Ritual
Wendell Berry From "Sabbaths"
Michael Blumenthal
Deep Ecology Cherries
The Geologist
Meditation on Politics at the
Quabbin Reservoir
Philip Booth
Navigation March Again
Seasons
Christopher Buckley
Rain/Light Autumn's End
Sycamore Canyon Nocturne
Early Morning-Ucross, Wyoming
Teresa Cader
A Season for Hunting
A Promise
Amy Clampitt
Green North Fork
Seed
Shorebirds in Seasonal Plumage
Observed Through Binoculars
Judith Ortiz Cofer
The Chameleon
Cultivator
Why There Are No Unicorns
Michael Collier
Seneca Street Consider the Garden
Landscape
Chard DeMord
I Stand beneath the Mountain with an Illiterate Heart
This Is a Blessing, This Is a Curse
There Is an Error at the Heart of Desire
Carl Dennis
Spring
Tune-up
Rita Dove
Rusks
Dissolve
The Great Piece of Turf
Cornelius Eady
Drizzle
Nature Poem
Too Young to Know
John Engels
Garden
In March
Meadow
Walking to Cootehill
Landslide
Carol Frost
Refusal
Being
Sexual Jealousy
Papilio
Alice Fulton
A Little Heart to Heart With the Horizon
A.M.: The Hopeful Monster
Dana Gioia
Becoming a Redwood
Rough Country
Pamela White Hadas
Lion of God in Vermont in May
Curious Experiments
Donald Hall
Surf ace
Pluvia
"Winter's asperity mollifies . .
"Mount Kearsarge shines . .
Daniel Halpern
The Approach
Annuals
Joy Hario
Wolf Warrior
Juan Felipe Herrera
After All
We Are Made
House Is Empty Now
A Crack inside My Breast
William Heyen
Grace
Fur
Canary
Wish
Edward Hirsch
Summer Surprised Us
In the Midwest
First Snowfall: Intimations
Roald Hoffmann
The Bering Bridge
Jonathan Holden
Face Up
September: Nederland, Colorado
Garrett Kaoru Hongo
Stomping With Pettit on the Battenkill
David Huddle
The Snow Monkey Argues with God
Inside the Hummingbird Aviary
Perspective
Visit of the Hawk
Richard Jackson
The Other Day
-For a Long Time I Have Wanted to
Write a Happy Poem
Mark Jarman
Wave
Chimney Swifts
Donald Justice
Invitation to a Ghost
Richard Kenney
Millenary
Lens
Concrete Delivery by Goose &
Gosling Crossing, Late March,
Mallett's Bay
Maxine Kumin
October, Yellowstone Park
Sydney Lea
The Fish Pond
Prospect
Paternity
David Lehman
Greenhouses and Gardens
On the Nature of Desire
Gary Margolis
Autumn Bees on Broccoli Blossoms
Gone-by
On the Way to the Sitter's
Kicking and Breathing
Paul Mariani
Landscape with Dog
Shadow Portrait
Moonrise as Abstraction
Mountain View with Figures
Variations on a Theme by Justice
Charles Martin
Reflections after a Dry Spell
What the Dark Proposes
William Matthews
Names
The Bear at the Dump
The Dogs of Montone
Sentence
The Rented House in Maine
D. McC]atchy
Chott
Late Night Ode
Christopher Merrill
Day Lilies: Instructions and an Elegy
The Bees
John Frederick Nims
Understanding the Universe
The Mouse
Jean Nordhaus
Adirondack Return
Protecting the Children from
Hurricanes
Bluegrass
Carole Simmons Oles
The Cedar Waxwing
The Radioactive Ball
Gregory Orr
Dark Praycr
The Gray Fox
The Cliff
Meadow in Spring
Robert Pack
Watchers
It Would Have Been Enough
Bounty
Fathering the Map
Mountain Ash without Cedar
Waxwings
Jay Parini
Mizzle
Some Compensation
Bliss
Belonging
Stars Falling
Linda Pastan
The Birds
Hardwood
Beall Mountain Seasonal
Robert Pinsky
The City Dark
In Berkeley
"Everywhere I Go, There I Am"
Stanley Plumly
Dove
In Answer to Amy's Question What's
a Pickerel
Dusk Coming on outside
New York
Human Excrement
Wyatt Prunty
The Offset
Haying
The Elbow Tree
Hilda Raz
For Barbara, Who Brings a Green
Stone in the Shape of a Triangle
Teaching, Hurt
Ira Sadoff
In the Bog behind My House
I join the Sparrows
Red Tail Sonnet
On the job
Birches, Revisited: October
Sherod Santos
The Dairy Cows of Maria Christina
Cortes
Of Haloes & Saintly Aspects
Still Life with Minnows
Augury
Jane Shore
Sawdust
Robert Siegel
Slug
Turtles
Silverfish
Tom Sleigh
Shame
Dave Smith
The Egret Tree
Out Whistling
Fieldswirl, October
Pulling a Pig's Tail
Moles in Spring
Gary Snyder
Night Song of the Los Angeles Basin
Raven's Beak River at the End
Katherine Soniat
A Last Warm Day
A Shared Life
Marcia Southwick
The Magic Broom
The Waves
William Stafford
Gaea
Entering a Wilderness Area
Spirit of Place: Great Blue Heron
Kolob Canyon
Gerald Stern
Birthday
Ducks Are for Our Happiness
Bitter Thoughts
Anne Stevenson
Salter's Gate
Cold
Level Cambridgeshire
Painting It In
Mark Strand
Here
Dabney Stuart
Desolation
Palm Reader
Figure on the Edge
Rumination
Eric Trethewey
Florilegium
Resurrection at West Lake
Reading the Signs
Near Dawn
Chase Twichell
Ghost Birches
Dirt
The Immortal Pilots
Snow in Condoland
Mona Van Duyn
Poets in Late Winter
Marilyn Nelson Waniek
Abba Jacob and St. Francis
Dusting
Rosanna Warren
The Cormorant
Man, That Is Born of Woman
Song
Richard Wilbur
A Wall in the Woods: Cummington
Nancy Willard
The Self-Defense of Peaches
A Little Blessing
In Praise of the Puffball
The Wisdom of the Geese
Charles Wright
Reading Lao Tzu Again in the
New Year
Looking outside the Cabin Window,
I Remember a Line by Li Po
Winter-Worship
Mondo Henbane
Gary Young
Four Poems
Paul Zimmer
Another Place Crazy with Love What I Know about Owls The Brain of the Spider
Robert Pack
Afterword: Taking Dominion over the Wilderness
Contributors
Acknowledgments