“EACH MONTH, Orion’s poetry editor, Camille Dungy, and friends recommend environmentally engaged poetry collections they think our readers might enjoy. This month we’re honoring Latinx and Hispanic Heritage Month with a fresh list of excellent recent collections from new and familiar poets. Take note and add some to your reading list!”
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“Established in 1936 and given in memory of James Ingram Merrill, with generous support from the T. S. Eliot Foundation, this prize recognizes distinguished poetic achievement and carries with it a stipend of $25,000 and a residency at the Eliot summer home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Fellows are nominated and elected by a majority vote of the Academy’s Board of Chancellors. Past recipients include Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Frost, and Tracy K. Smith.”
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“Camille T. Dungy is both an outstanding writer of the “natural world” and one of the most deft makers of metaphor working today. Her metaphors refuse to let the reader rest in their connections, but instead create a kind of friction in the mapping of vehicle onto tenor, an incongruity that invites the reader to follow the various threads of implication in an unlikely pairing. Perhaps the connection between those two strengths—unsettling, dynamic metaphors and precise observation of the natural world—is no accident.”
“And in one of the most restorative and uplifting poems, Camille T. Dungy’s ‘Trophic Cascade’ there is a bountiful account of re-wilding and what happened in Yellowstone when they reintroduced the grey wolf. This led to trees growing up ‘beyond the deer stunt/of the midcentury’ and with that the return of underbrush which ‘warrened snowshoe hare’ and soon the place, and thus the poem is full of songbirds, muskrats and American dippers while abundant berries bring in the bears.”
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Two miles into
the sky, the snow
builds a mountain
unto itself.
Some drifts can be
thirty feet high.
Picture a house.
Then bury it.
[…]
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Listen here.
My name, Camille, means witness at the sacrifice.
What could I make of this when I was young? What sacrifice?
Coastal breeze and jacaranda trees when I was young.
When we moved, the hope of temperate weather was one sacrifice.
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Let me tell you, America, this one last thing.
I will never be finished dreaming about you.