One of my favorite pieces in the book, \u201cSnapping Turtle,\u201d tells of a similar encounter. She finds the turtle of the title in the middle of the road, and stops to coax it across before another car comes and runs it over. The image of a woman hunched over, wiggling a finger in front of a massive snapping turtle is fabulously absurd\u2014but what\u2019s even more absurd is that it actually seems to work. The turtle, though, is not moved by an understanding of her benign intentions, but from an instinctive violence, evident in \u201cthe concentrated menace of its advance.\u201d There\u2019s a hint of Bishop in these lines. I\u2019m thinking most specifically of \u201cThe Fish,\u201d which also portrays an ancient, prehuman sensibility, and a suspicion of violence behind every rainbow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Pope carries it further in \u201cCurrents,\u201d which presents a great blue heron on a river bank. She watches as it takes \u201ca delicate, stately step \/ on impossibly thin legs, \/ hinged like the ribs of a folding umbrella.\u201d What a perfect simile! In some ways, her work is reminiscent of another of my favorites, Mary Oliver\u2014but while Oliver more typically portrays a detached wonder and reflection in stillness, Pope more actively engages with her subjects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I could go on about the force of Nature in her work, but let me jump to \u201cAt the Next Congregation for the Causes of Saints.\u201d The final stanza is a floral compendium, with talk of purslane, mulleins, burdocks, teasels, cat-tails, fleabane, and Scotch broom. I\u2019m sure these are not just names she pulled out of a hat, but flowers she genuinely recognizes by sight. I am reminded of yet another of my favorite writers, Isaac Babel, who recalls an old mentor pointing at all the trees and birds that he would see every day and ask what they were. To his chagrin, he did not know. The old man concludes with, \u201cAnd you presume to write?\u2026 A man who does not live in nature as a bird or an animal lives in it will never write two worthwhile lines in all his life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t know if Pope has read Babel, but I suspect she would agree with that sentiment. Perhaps that’s why she can give us such fabulous descriptive metaphors: a cluster of tadpoles \u201cstill a nova of apple seeds,\u201d a rusted out bridge a \u201csteel cat\u2019s cradle\u201d (I hope younger readers know what that is), a rat snake \u201cblack as a shredded tire.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n What i find great about Nature poets is when they consider people and society with the same sense of curiosity and wonder. That\u2019s exactly what Pope does in the first section of the book, which focuses on childhood memories of a troubled family that is at times harmonious, at times unhappy in its own way. It\u2019s clear she gets her affinity for the natural world from her father, who seemed far more at home alone in a fishing boat than driving a station wagon full of kids through town. Some of these poems have the tone of an adult trying to peel away the unreliable accretions of memory to get at the actual facts and understand them from a grown-up perspective, rather than just accept them from a child\u2019s view. Others display a willful desire to do the opposite: \u201cI refuse to remember \/ the details,\u201d she writes. We learn of her father\u2019s drinking, gambling, and fatal cancer, and her mother\u2019s failed attempts to leave him, all of which remain confusing for an adult, incomprehensible for a child. And yet there seems to have been genuine love and affection in the family. Hence, the sense of poignancy and wistfulness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I mentioned Pope\u2019s penchant for finding the perfect word. One in particular will always stay with me: in \u201cToo Close to See,\u201d she concludes by describing \u201cgrief\u201d as \u201cunanswerable.\u201d In all our vast language, I can think of no better word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many of the poems in this collection appear in journals that I often read, so it\u2019s not surprising that I\u2019m drawn her work\u2014though all the more surprising that I have not encountered it before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Deborah Pope: Take Nothing While in New York recently, I visited the Strand Bookstore, which is akin to the hajj for bibliophiles\u2014everyone should do it at least once in their life. It\u2019s encouraging to see the venerable seller of new … Continue reading ![](\"https:\/\/m.media-amazon.com\/images\/I\/813WeFQZItL._SY466_.jpg\")
<\/a>I don\u2019t know if she\u2019d consider herself a Nature poet, but she\u2019s at her best when she turns her keen powers of observation and metaphor upon the natural world. In \u201cEncounter,\u201d for example, she comes home to find a red-tailed hawk on a lawn chair, which \u201ccocked the copper curve \/ of its head, sharpening \/ the profile of the black, sickle beak.\u201d Its calm self-assurance and power leaves her, \u201cthere\u2019s no other word for it\u2014 \/ raptured.\u201d How could you not love that self-reflexive joy of finding the perfect word\u2014one that both clearly defines the emotion and brings a clever pun as well?<\/p>\n\n\n\n