Book

Black nature : four centuries of African American nature poetry / edited by Camille T. Dungy.

Athens, Georgia : The University of Georgia Press, [2009]

©2009

xxxv, 387 pages ; 24 cm

This book 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. The author 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. It also brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole.

Nature -- Poetry.

American poetry -- African American authors.

American poetry -- African American authors -- History and criticism.

Nature poetry.

Poetry.

Dungy, Camille T., 1972- editor.

Four centuries of African American nature poetry

Includes bibliographical references and index.

We must be careful / Ed Roberson -- Earth is a living thing / Lucille Clifton -- Mountains of California, part I / Al Young -- Mountain road ends here / G.E. Patterson -- Queen Anne's lace / June Jordan -- On summer / George Moses Horton -- Yellow jacket / Nikki Giovanni -- Eclogue at twilight / Yusef Komunyakaa -- Ruellia noctiflora / Marilyn Nelson -- Evening primrose / Rita Dove -- Night-blooming cereus / Robert Hayden -- September night / George Marion McClellan -- Sweet enough ocean, cotton / Thylias Moss -- Metamorphism / Helene Johnson -- Brown girl's nature poem: provincetown / Toni Wynn -- What more? / Gerald Barrax Sr. -- Be careful / Ed Roberson -- Watching blackbirds turn to ghosts / Rachel Eliza Griffiths -- If winter comes, can spring? / Alvin Aubert -- 31 words * prose poems [#12] / Rita Shockley.

We are not strangers here / Ravi Howard -- For a farmer / James A. Emanuel -- To waste at trees / Gerald Barrax Sr. -- White dog / Carl Phillips -- You must walk this lonesome / Evie Shockley -- Down from the houses of magic / Cyrus Cassells -- Ephemera / George Marion McClellan -- Sleepwalker on the mountain / Ruth Ellen Kocher -- #543 / Richard Wright -- Aphrodite of economy / Mark McMorris -- Arachis hypogaea / Marilyn Nelson -- In the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge, thinking of Rachel Carson / Anthony Walton -- language / Camille T. Dungy -- For Alice Walker (a summertime tanka) / June Jordan -- Generations / Lucille Clifton -- Work / Yusef Komunyakaa -- Poem to my child, if ever you shall be / Ross Gay -- To a certain lady, in her garden / Sterling Brown -- Urban nature / Ed Roberson -- September songs / Reginald Shepherd.

from 12 million Black voices / Richard Wright -- Another April / Anne Spencer -- Barriers / Gerald Barrax Sr. -- Young peacock / Lenard D. Moore -- Urban renewal: XIII / Major Jackson -- Bees / Audre Lorde -- Carrion / Anthony Walton -- Look at the blackbird fall / June Jordan -- Flight of the California condor / Wanda Coleman -- Since everyone can never be safe / Camille T. Dungy -- Won't be but a minute / Patricia Smith -- Called / Michael S. Harper -- Harvest song / Jean Toomer -- Black man talks of reaping / Arna Bontemps -- Wood and rain / Melvin Dixon -- Joy in the woods / Claude McKay -- Sorrow home / Margaret Walker -- Blues aubade (or, Revision of the lean, post-modernist pastorale) / Honorée Fanonne Jeffers -- Romance / Ed Roberson -- April is on the way / Alice Dunbar-Nelson.

Boll weevils, coyotes, and the color of nuisance / C.S. Giscombe -- Miscarriage in October with ladybugs / Amber Flora Thomas -- Man reading in bed by a window with bugs / Gregory Pardlo -- Pest / Major Jackson -- Ambition II: mosquito in the mist / Tim Seibles -- #459 / Richard Wright -- Market / Thomas Sayers Ellis -- For those who need a true story / Tara Betts -- Postcard to an ecologist / Lenard D. Moore -- Nature boy / C.S. Giscombe -- Plague of starlings / Robert Hayden -- O believer / Janice N. Harrington -- Brown menace or poem to the survival of roaches / Audre Lorde -- Life / Kwame Alexander -- What a snakehead discovered in a Maryland pond and a poet in corporate America have in common / Kamilah Aisha Moon -- Lost conquistador / Shane Book -- Beginning of the end of the world / Lucille Clifton -- Carpenter bee / Natasha Trethewey -- Yellowjackets / Yusef Komunyakaa.

Flowers / Alice Walker -- On imagination / Phillis Wheatley -- For Saundra / Nikki Giovanni -- Natural world / G.E. Patterson -- Lament for dark peoples / Langston Hughes -- White things / Anne Spencer -- Parsley / Rita Dove -- Haunted oak / Paul Laurence Dunbar -- from Rape of Florida, Canto I / Albery Whitman -- Swimchant of nigger mer-folk (an aquaboogie set in lapis) / Douglas Kearney -- Water USA / Clarence Major -- Migration / Major Jackson -- February leaving / Ruth Ellen Kocher -- Blue horses / Ed Roberson -- Sick man looks at flowers / Gwendolyn Brooks -- Prodigal / Arna Bontemps -- Potters' field / Cynthia Parker-Ohene -- Monument / Natasha Trethewey.

Disasters, nature, and poetry / Mona Lisa Saloy -- Floodtide / Askia M. Touré -- Children of the Mississippi / Sterling Brown -- Emmett Till / James A. Emanuel -- Sign post / Devorah Major -- Song / Audre Lorde -- Sacred history of the earth / G.E. Patterson -- Greenness taller than gods / Yusef Komunyakaa -- San Francisco, spring 1986 / Patricia Spears Jones -- Cure / Carl Phillips -- Liturgy / Natasha Trethewey -- Reapers / Jean Toomer -- Earthquake blues / Ishmael Reed -- Erasure / Amber Flora Thomas -- Floodsong 2: water moccasin's spiritual / Douglas Kearney -- Requiem / Anne Spencer -- Ice storm / Robert Hayden.

Shepherd's tale / Sean Hill -- Beehive / Jean Toomer -- Black-and-white dusk at Limantour Beach / Rachel Eliza Griffiths -- Sympathy / Paul Laurence Dunbar -- Sea-turtle and the shark / Melvin B. Tolson -- #175 / Richard Wright -- European folk tale variant / Harryette Mullen -- Man raised as chicken / Wendy S. Walters -- Far / C.S. Giscombe -- Spider speaks / Shara McCallum -- Hummingbird / Cyrus Cassells -- Herd / Tim Seibles -- Speed / Cornelius Eady -- Points of view / Ishmael Reed -- Requiem for a nest / Wanda Coleman -- Surfaces and masks: XXX / Clarence Major -- Minks / Toi Derricotte -- Possum / Janice N. Harrington -- Appaloosa / Afaa Michael Weaver -- April lyric/All I know is / G.E. Patterson.

April in Eatonton / Honorée Fanonne Jeffers -- Locus / Robert Hayden -- Jaguaripe / Myronn Hardy -- What there was / Janice N. Harrington -- Wind talker / Frank X Walker -- Mulberry fields / Lucille Clifton -- I am black and the trees are green / E. Ethelbert Miller -- Maple remains / Amaud Jamaul Johnson -- Tallahatchie lullaby, baby / Douglas Kearney -- Out in the country of my country / June Jordan -- Three days of forest, a river, free / Rita Dove -- American light / Claudia Rankine -- Look ahead, look south: the future / C.S. Giscombe -- Southern song / Margaret Walker -- Wave / Ed Roberson -- Her table mountain / Evie Shockley -- from Juneteenth: the bicentennial poem / Sherley Anne Williams -- Tap-root / Indigo Moor -- Last talk with Jim Hardwick / Marilyn Nelson -- History as apple tree / Michael S. Harper.

Writing home / Camille T. Dungy -- #559 / Richard Wright -- Millpond / Yusef Komunyakaa -- Seven pastorals at sixteen / Sean Hill -- Before a screen door / Janice N. Harrington -- Pull / Indigo Moor -- Two directions / C.S. Giscombe -- My grandfather walks in the woods / Marilyn Nelson -- Mississippi gardens / Stephanie Pruitt -- I called them trees / Gerald Barrax Sr. -- Beaches, why I don't care for them / Wanda Coleman -- At 57, my father learns to grow things / Ruth Ellen Kocher -- Suburban noir / Gregory Pardlo -- Letter to the local police / June Jordan -- Homeopathic / Frank X Walker -- Root / Terrance Hayes -- What my child learns of the sea / Audre Lorde -- Ritual of season / Remica L. Bingham -- More than once in caves / Mark McMorris -- Pachuta, Mississippi/A memoir / Al Young.

First skunk of spring / Marilyn Nelson -- [Earth, I thank you] / Anne Spencer -- Bemidji in spring / Sean Hill -- Winter poem / Nikki Giovanni -- After the winter / Claude McKay -- For Alexis / Joanne V. Gabbin -- Thank you / Ross Gay -- Spring down / George Marion McClellan -- Deep in the quiet wood / James Weldon Johnson -- Violets / Alice Dunbar-Nelson -- Man, his bowl, his raspberries / Claudia Rankine -- What to eat, and what to drink, and what to leave for poison / Camille T. Dungy -- Earth song / Langston Hughes -- Rondeau / Jessie Redmon Fauset -- Southern living / Kendra Hamilton -- Geraniums / Elizabeth Alexander -- My Mississippi spring / Margaret Walker -- Fearless / Tim Seibles.

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