Black nature :

Black nature : four centuries of African American nature poetry edited by Camille T. Dungy. - xxxv, 387 pages ; 23 cm.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

We must be careful / Earth is a living thing / Mountains of California, part I / Mountain road ends here / Queen Anne's lace / On summer / Yellow jacket / Eclogue at twilight / Ruellia noctiflora / Evening primrose / Night-blooming cereus / September night / Sweet enough ocean, cotton / Metamorphism / Brown girl's nature poem: provincetown / What more? / Be careful / Watching blackbirds turn to ghosts / If winter comes, can spring? / 31 words * prose poems [#12] / Ed Roberson -- Lucille Clifton -- Al Young -- G.E. Patterson -- June Jordan -- George Moses Horton -- Nikki Giovanni -- Yusef Komunyakaa -- Marilyn Nelson -- Rita Dove -- Robert Hayden -- George Marion McClellan -- Thylias Moss -- Helene Johnson -- Toni Wynn -- Gerald Barrax Sr. -- Ed Roberson -- Rachel Eliza Griffiths -- Alvin Aubert -- Rita Shockley. Cycle one: Just looking. We are not strangers here / For a farmer / To waste at trees / White dog / You must walk this lonesome / Down from the houses of magic / Ephemera / Sleepwalker on the mountain / #543 / Aphrodite of economy / Arachis hypogaea / In the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge, thinking of Rachel Carson / language / For Alice Walker (a summertime tanka) / Generations / Work / Poem to my child, if ever you shall be / To a certain lady, in her garden / Urban nature / September songs / Ravi Howard -- James A. Emanuel -- Gerald Barrax Sr. -- Carl Phillips -- Evie Shockley -- Cyrus Cassells -- George Marion McClellan -- Ruth Ellen Kocher -- Richard Wright -- Mark McMorris -- Marilyn Nelson -- Anthony Walton -- Camille T. Dungy -- June Jordan -- Lucille Clifton -- Yusef Komunyakaa -- Ross Gay -- Sterling Brown -- Ed Roberson -- Reginald Shepherd. Cycle two: Nature, be with us. from 12 million Black voices / Another April / Barriers / Young peacock / Urban renewal: XIII / Bees / Carrion / Look at the blackbird fall / Flight of the California condor / Since everyone can never be safe / Won't be but a minute / Called / Harvest song / Black man talks of reaping / Wood and rain / Joy in the woods / Sorrow home / Blues aubade (or, Revision of the lean, post-modernist pastorale) / Romance / April is on the way / Richard Wright -- Anne Spencer -- Gerald Barrax Sr. -- Lenard D. Moore -- Major Jackson -- Audre Lorde -- Anthony Walton -- June Jordan -- Wanda Coleman -- Camille T. Dungy -- Patricia Smith -- Michael S. Harper -- Jean Toomer -- Arna Bontemps -- Melvin Dixon -- Claude McKay -- Margaret Walker -- Honor�ee Fanonne Jeffers -- Ed Roberson -- Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Cycle three: Dirt on our hands. Boll weevils, coyotes, and the color of nuisance / Miscarriage in October with ladybugs / Man reading in bed by a window with bugs / Pest / Ambition II: mosquito in the mist / Market / For those who need a true story / Postcard to an ecologist / Nature boy / Plague of starlings / O believer / Brown menace or poem to the survival of roaches / Life / What a snakehead discovered in a Maryland pond and a poet in corporate America have in common / Lost conquistador / Beginning of the end of the world / Carpenter bee / Yellowjackets / C.S. Giscombe -- Amber Flora Thomas -- Gregory Pardlo -- Major Jackson -- Tim Seibles -- #459 / Richard Wright -- Thomas Sayers Ellis -- Tara Betts -- Lenard D. Moore -- C.S. Giscombe -- Robert Hayden -- Janice N. Harrington -- Audre Lorde -- Kwame Alexander -- Kamilah Aisha Moon -- Shane Book -- Lucille Clifton -- Natasha Trethewey -- Yusef Komunyakaa. Cycle four: Pests, people too. Flowers / On imagination / For Saundra / Natural world / Lament for dark peoples / White things / Parsley / Haunted oak / from Rape of Florida, Canto I / Swimchant of nigger mer-folk (an aquaboogie set in lapis) / Water USA / Migration / February leaving / Blue horses / Sick man looks at flowers / Prodigal / Potters' field / Monument / Alice Walker -- Phillis Wheatley -- Nikki Giovanni -- G.E. Patterson -- Langston Hughes -- Anne Spencer -- Rita Dove -- Paul Laurence Dunbar -- Albery Whitman -- Douglas Kearney -- Clarence Major -- Major Jackson -- Ruth Ellen Kocher -- Ed Roberson -- Gwendolyn Brooks -- Arna Bontemps -- Cynthia Parker-Ohene -- Natasha Trethewey. Cycle five: Forsaken of the earth. Disasters, nature, and poetry / Floodtide / Children of the Mississippi / Emmett Till / Sign post / Song / Sacred history of the earth / Greenness taller than gods / San Francisco, spring 1986 / Cure / Reapers / Erasure / Floodsong 2: water moccasin's spiritual / Requiem / Ice storm / Mona Lisa Saloy -- Askia M. Tour�e -- Sterling Brown -- James A. Emanuel -- Devorah Major -- Audre Lorde -- G.E. Patterson -- Yusef Komunyakaa -- Patricia Spears Jones -- Carl Phillips -- Liturgy / Natasha Trethewey -- Jean Toomer -- Earthquake blues / Ishmael Reed -- Amber Flora Thomas -- Douglas Kearney -- Anne Spencer -- Robert Hayden. Cycle six: Disasters, natural and other. Shepherd's tale / Beehive / Black-and-white dusk at Limantour Beach / Sympathy / Sea-turtle and the shark / #175 / European folk tale variant / Man raised as chicken / Far / Spider speaks / Hummingbird / Herd / Speed / Points of view / Requiem for a nest / Surfaces and masks: XXX / Minks / Possum / Appaloosa / April lyric/All I know is / Sean Hill -- Jean Toomer -- Rachel Eliza Griffiths -- Paul Laurence Dunbar -- Melvin B. Tolson -- Richard Wright -- Harryette Mullen -- Wendy S. Walters -- C. S. Giscombe -- Shara McCallum -- Cyrus Cassells -- Tim Seibles -- Cornelius Eady -- Ishmael Reed -- Wanda Coleman -- Clarence Major -- Toi Derricotte -- Janice N. Harrington -- Afaa Michael Weaver -- G.E. Patterson. Cycle seven: Talk of the animals. April in Eatonton / Locus / Jaguaripe / What there was / Wind talker / Mulberry fields / I am black and the trees are green / Maple remains / Tallahatchie lullaby, baby / Out in the country of my country / Three days of forest, a river, free / American light / Look ahead, look south: the future / Southern song / Wave / Her table mountain / from Juneteenth: the bicentennial poem / Tap-root / Last talk with Jim Hardwick / History as apple tree / Honor�ee Fanonne Jeffers -- Robert Hayden -- Myronn Hardy -- Janice N. Harrington -- Frank X Walker -- Lucille Clifton -- E. Ethelbert Miller -- Amaud Jamaul Johnson -- Douglas Kearney -- June Jordan -- Rita Dove -- Claudia Rankine -- C. S. Giscombe -- Margaret Walker -- Ed Roberson -- Evie Shockley -- Sherley Anne Williams -- Indigo Moor -- Marilyn Nelson -- Michael S. Harper. Cycle eight: What the land remembers. Writing home / #559 / Millpond / Seven pastorals at sixteen / Before a screen door / Pull / Two directions / My grandfather walks in the woods / Mississippi gardens / I called them trees / Beaches, why I don't care for them / At 57, my father learns to grow things / Suburban noir / Letter to the local police / Homeopathic / Root / What my child learns of the sea / Ritual of season / More than once in caves / Pachuta, Mississippi/A memoir / Camille T. Dungy -- Richard Wright -- Yusef Komunyakaa -- Sean Hill -- Janice N. Harrington -- Indigo Moor -- C. S. Giscombe -- Marilyn Nelson -- Stephanie Pruitt -- Gerald Barrax Sr. -- Wanda Coleman -- Ruth Ellen Kocher -- Gregory Pardlo -- June Jordan -- Frank X Walker -- Terrance Hayes -- Audre Lorde -- Remica L. Bingham -- Mark McMorris -- Al Young. Cycle nine: Growing out of this land. First skunk of spring / [Earth, I thank you] / Bemidji in spring / Winter poem / After the winter / For Alexis / Thank you / Spring down / Deep in the quiet wood / Violets / Man, his bowl, his raspberries / What to eat, and what to drink, and what to leave for poison / Earth song / Rondeau / Southern living / Geraniums / My Mississippi spring / Fearless / Marilyn Nelson -- Anne Spencer -- Sean Hill -- Nikki Giovanni -- Claude McKay -- Joanne V. Gabbin -- Ross Gay -- George Marion McClellan -- James Weldon Johnson -- Alice Dunbar-Nelson -- Claudia Rankine -- Camille T. Dungy -- Langston Hughes -- Jessie Redmon Fauset -- Kendra Hamilton -- Elizabeth Alexander -- Margaret Walker -- Tim Seibles. Cycle ten: Comes always spring.

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.

9780820334318


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


Anthologie.

PS 591.N4 / .B561 2009