Tarkabarka reviewed Nature Matters by Karen McCarthy Woolf
Fascinating in many ways
5 stars
(ARC copy) I was fascinated by this collection for several reasons. One is that it introduced me to a whole lot of poets (from the past 50 years) I have not known before. I was enjoying the sense of recognition with those I knew, and the excitement of discovery for those I want to read more from now. Obviously the goal of the collection was to introduce readers to nature poetry written by global majority poets - but through this lens, it also challenges what qualifies as "nature poetry" and even what qualifies as "nature." The poems had a wide range of styles, forms, and topics; and themes woven through such as identity, immigration, climate crisis, colonialism, etc. There were several that deeply touched me and invited longer contemplation. Others knowingly challenged the reader with text that was disjointed, multilingual, written in dialect, or spliced into other texts (the latter …
(ARC copy) I was fascinated by this collection for several reasons. One is that it introduced me to a whole lot of poets (from the past 50 years) I have not known before. I was enjoying the sense of recognition with those I knew, and the excitement of discovery for those I want to read more from now. Obviously the goal of the collection was to introduce readers to nature poetry written by global majority poets - but through this lens, it also challenges what qualifies as "nature poetry" and even what qualifies as "nature." The poems had a wide range of styles, forms, and topics; and themes woven through such as identity, immigration, climate crisis, colonialism, etc. There were several that deeply touched me and invited longer contemplation. Others knowingly challenged the reader with text that was disjointed, multilingual, written in dialect, or spliced into other texts (the latter one, Karen McCarthy Woolf's "Horse Chestnut I" was one of my favorites in the book). It would sound like a cliché to say it is a diverse collection, but I don't only mean it by the ethnic identities of the poets. I love reading nature poetry, but I have often felt that some collections I came across presented a very pretty, "poetic", inspiring image of nature. The nature represented in these poems is different. Viscerally connected to humans in all ways good and bad, messy, fascinating, ever-present, meaningful, metaphorical, mythical, personal. It was refreshing to venture beyond admiration into emotional and artistic complexity.