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Unread 09-10-2015, 01:50 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Location: San Diego, CA, USA
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I really loved D. R. Goodman's Greed: A Confession (Able Muse Press, 2014). It's full of well-crafted and startlingly original poems featuring nature, particularly birds. (I almost said "about nature," but poems are rarely "about" their subject matter.)

You can find four examples from the book are here, although I like many others better. The last line of "Owls in the City Hills" still blows me away every time, but there's another owl poem in the book that makes my spine tingle from start to finish. And oh, she's got this Petrarchan sonnet, full of off-rhyme and enjambment and a volta in not quite the right place, which contrasts a pigeon's slovenliness with its unexpected ability to see the stars in the daytime (sort of like the unexpected elegance of the Petrarchan form itself, in such a setting); by the end of the poem, the human observer seems the lower lifeform.

As long as I'm plugging Able Muse Press stuff, I may as well take another opportunity to rave about Richard Newman's All the Wasted Beauty of the World. Many of his poems feature nature in an urban setting--messy mulberry trees, possums, overgrown lots, cemeteries--and he finds a lot of genuine, unsentimental beauty among the decay and debris. Brilliant craftsmanship, too, in both formal and free verse.

[Edited to say: On second thought, it would be a pretty big stretch to characterize Richard Newman's entire book as "ecopoetry"; but a good portion of D. R. Goodman's book relates to nature in some way.]

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 09-10-2015 at 09:53 PM.
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