Found this in an old notebook.

Taurus

Ray Zimmerman

Taurus, bull of heaven,

Zodiac constellation,

lies on the ecliptic.

Ishtar released the bull.

It was vengeance against Gilgamesh

who refused her affections.

The bull scorched the earth.

Gilgamesh said “Let us go

and kill this bull of heaven.”

Enkidu, his friend, demurred.

“Let us not kill this bull of heaven,”

yet they destroyed the bull.

The land regained its strength.

Ishtar asked her father for revenge.

They have killed the bull of heaven!

Gilgamesh, half divine, was spared.

Mortal Enkidu died, lay in state for seven days.

Flash fiction International

Reviewed by Ray Zimmerman

I usually compare the novel to a mammal, be it wild as a tiger or tame as a cow; the short story to a bird or a fish; the microstory to an insect (iridescent in the best cases). - Louisa Valenzuela

Luisa Valenuzeula’s statement has a certain charm as she compares the very short fiction form, now known as flash fiction, to iridescent insects, but I prefer to liken them to gems, lustrous with beauty and hard as the truths they reveal. The editors of Flash Fiction International selected eighty-six of the best of the best stories in this form. The editors included stories from locations as diverse as The United States, Iraq, Bangladesh, Argentina and Zimbabwe.

A review of all eighty-six stories is not possible, but a sampling serves to illustrate the diversity of voices in this collection drawn from world wide sources:

In “The Waterfall,” Alberto Chimal of Mexico describes a ritual which combines christening and baptism, in which the drops of consecrated water are likened to the souls of the dead, each hoping that his (or her) name will be preserved, that their name will be the one given to the young child.  Will the selected name be Guglielmo, Terencio, Jason, Emil, or some other

In “Prisoner of War,” by Mune Fadhill of Iraq, a man returns home after eighteen years in an Iranian prison to see his now deceased wife’s likeness in the face of a grown daughter. He withdraws into his own world of repairing technology. He is changed and the world around him is changed.

In “Eating Bone” by Shabian Nadiya of Bangladesh describes a wife threated with divorce after ten years of a childless marriage. She asserts herself in a surprising way. Meanwhile, Natalie Diaz of the United States portrays a legless veteran who takes to his wheelchair and cruises the dancefloor of “The Injun Who Could,” intoxicated female tourists.

Although many of the stories are new works by contemporary writers, some very short classics have made their way into this collection. “The Young Widow,” by the Roman author Petronius joins “Appointment in Samarra” (W. Sommerset Maugham) and “An Imperial Message” (Franz Kaufka).

These brief narratives range from one to three pages, and each is a complete story in itself. This collection is as bright as a star field on a dark winter night.

MUSIC AND STORYTELLING FOR ALL AGES

November 7 & 8

Cloudland Canyon State Park

Ray Zimmerman Master of Ceremonies

For information on other aspects of this event see http://mountainartsandcraftcelebration.com/... or https://www.facebook.com/FOCCSP

Saturday - November 7

ê 10:35 to 11:35 (Music) No Till Drillers

ê 12:00 to 1:00 (Music) Scarlett Stitch

ê 1:30 to 1:55 Amber Lanier Nagel

ê 2:00 to 2:25 Finn Bille

ê 2:45 to 3:45 (Music) Rising Fawn Social Club

Sunday  - November 8

ê 10:00 to 11:00 (Music) Brian Henry

ê 11:15 to 12:15 (Music) Scarlett Stitch

ê 12:45 to 1:10  Ray Zimmerman

ê 1:15 to 1:40 Michael Gray

ê 2:15 to 3:00 (Music) Jerome Arnold

ê 3:30 to 4:30 (Music) Organized Kaos

Place Based Writing

This piece previously appeared in the Dade County Sentinel and the Chattanoogan.com.

As I sit at a picnic table overlooking the Tennessee River, just below the Raccoon Mountain Pumped Storage Plant, the ripples of the river exude power. The ridge on the far side is marked by two cliffs, one above the other, which run most of the length. Each is tall and clearly visible above the trees. The river is quite deep here, with Nickajack dam not far below, but this flooded valley was once home to a much shallower river with rapids and shoals.

I cannot write much of that flooded valley, short of a time machine to go back and visit it. I know that boats leaving Chattanooga encountered “The Suck,” a place where the river narrowed and objects, sometimes even people, were pulled into the water below.  Submerged objects came to the surface further downstream at “The Pot,” where water bubbled up to the surface from those deeps. Further down, an obstacle known as “The Frying Pan,” caused more havoc for river traffic. To tell the full story of this section of river though, I would have to have visited it.

Years ago, Kentucky author Wendell Berry fully explored a place before writing of it. He hiked, canoed, and waded the Red River Gorge, and wrote a book titled The Unforeseen Wilderness.

The Army Corps of Engineers planned to flood this gorge, displacing a few scattered farmers and ending its natural state. Ironically, the dam which would flood the valley was proposed in the name of “Flood Control.”

Berry visited a farm only accessible by foot path or tractor during high water, and recorded the people’s connection to the land. He also recorded the beauty of the landscape with the insight and acumen his readers have come to expect in his writings about his rural homeland. He spent five years on the project, and may have originated the term “place based writing.” His words, and the photographs by Gene Meatyard, tell a story of incredible beauty.

I may someday visit the Red River Gorge, which remains without submersion, thanks to its designated status under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Protection of the gorge was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

Even if I visit, I cannot write its story, for this land is not mine. I would write as a man who viewed the gorge as scenery, or photograph it as one who stops at a scenic overlook and takes a snapshot. Berry warns of the dangers of scenery in his book.

My own experience of place based writing came about with a poem titled “Glen Falls Trail.” Glen Falls is near my current residence on the side of Lookout Mountain. I have lived in this area for years, and hiked the trail numerous times. One day I noticed the graffiti, “George Loves Lisa,” painted on the rock face in an archway above the falls. I wrote my poem about the beauty of this place, but included a speculation on the various possibilities of that relationship:

I wonder, did he ever tell her?

Did she know or think of him at all,

raise a brood of screaming children?

Did they kiss near wild ginger

above the stony apse?

The poem won a prize from the Tennessee Writers Alliance, including a substantial (to me at least) cash award. It was later included in the Southern Poetry Anthology: Volume VI, Tennessee (University of Texas Press).

I am convinced to this day that the success of this particular poem resulted from my association with the place where it is based. I am no Wendell Berry, nowhere near his phenomenal success of more than fifty books in print, but I agree with his belief that the best writing is placed based.

Ray Zimmerman is the Senior Editor of the anthology Southern Light: Twelve Contemporary Southern Poets, and author of the Poetry Chapbook, First Days. His poetry, nonfiction, and photography have appeared in regional and national publications. He has appeared as a storyteller and a performance poet in numerous Chattanooga area events. He is particularly pleased that his poem “Glen Falls Trail” received an award from the Tennessee Writers Alliance and appeared in The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volume VI, Tennessee (University of Texas Press).

The full text of the poem “Glen Falls Trail” appears At http://rayzimmerman.weebly.com

A Fish Tale

When Aldo Leopold included a chapter on fishing in his book A Sand County Almanac, he spoke to generations of conservationists and sportsmen on the beauty of small places. “The Alder Fork” described in his July chapter was not big in volume or rapids or in the size of the trout it yielded. It was big in its unique beauty and in the chance that it yielded fish on a hot July day. Leopold admitted that none of the trout had to be folded double or beheaded to fit the creel.

The story brought to mind an event from my college days, spent in my home town as a commuter student. I knew trout were nowhere to be found in the Ohio waters I fished, but I remembered stories of Todd’s Fork, a branch of the Little Miami River, and reputed home to smallmouth bass. I also remembered a sign which read “Fishing, but no Hunting or Camping.” It proclaimed its message where a back road passed near the fabled creek.

I had caught Largemouth Bass before in the nearby lakes, but it was only from photos that I knew the look of one of those “bronze backs.” Wishing to experience them for myself, I picked up a friend with his fishing gear and we headed for the spot. When we arrived, the pull off accommodated our car and left room for one more, though that second spot was never taken. We hiked a dirt road through a cornfield, and we were at a bridge overlooking Todd’s Fork. 

My friend unhooked his spinning rod and eyed the creek with disdain. It was narrow, but looked to my eye as though it held deep pools with some promise. As he complained about time spent on a “Wild Goose Chase,” I pulled out a few feet of level fly line and attached a leader and a red and white deer hair fly. Not exactly a Royal Coachman, but close.

On my second upstream cast a fish hit and I landed it after a short fight.  I noticed the dark bronze color, checked the size of the mouth, and discovered it did not extend behind the eye. Smallmouth Bass!  My friend looked at the fish and watched me release it, only slightly the worse for wear. I usually ate the fish I caught, but this one was too small for the frying pan.

Three more casts and I had another, slightly larger fish, but my friend was unimpressed. He didn’t see any fish that would make the pages of an angler’s newspaper, and was now anxious to leave. I don’t believe he ever cast a line.

I haven’t spoken to that friend in years, and don’t know if his opinion of our fishing adventure has changed. As for myself, I left with my heart full of a pleasant morning fishing a creek I had never before explored. For me, the morning’s adventure was not in the fish, but the fishing.

The events I describe here took place in the mid 1970’s. I later learned that the really good fishing was further downstream, and that I was actually fishing a small branch of Todd’s Fork. The main stream has since become noteworthy as a canoeing destination and continues to be known as a great spot to fish for Smallmouth Bass.

Snow Melt, February 26, 2015

Last night I saw snow, enough to remind me of years spent in more northern lands. It fell so hard and fast that my photos showed white streaks crossing the field of vision. The grassy yard and nearby trees, usually alight with cardinals, chickadees, titmice and wrens were strangely silent the next morning.

A colleague said she had salted her driveway before the snowstorm, but it didn’t work. My neighborhood roads got no treatment whatsoever, and no vehicles left all day.

Salt is great for removing ice, but not so good for eight inches of snow. Although I am hopeful of the roads being cleared so I can get out with my vehicle, I love to see the snow on the ground. Unbidden, the thought comes that I am an old man with a bad heart and this could be the last time I see the snow. It’s not likely, but possible.

Salt lowers the melting point of ice, gets it off the roadways, and it allows tires to get traction, especially when it is mixed with light gravel. When I leave my apartment overlooking the Tennessee River valley below, I hope for no ice on the roadway. I hope for days when salt is unnecessary.

Forty degree weather will melt snow fast, but eight inches is a lot of snow. Even with a layer of salt beneath it, there will be plenty left over for night time temperatures to refreeze. I will walk to work on Friday morning.

In his magnificent book, The Forest Unseen, David George Haskell recorded his observations of a square meter of virgin forest, never cut. It was on the property of the University of the South. He observed this square meter over the course of a year, and the winter portions include stories of snow, ice, cold temperatures, and the sometimes surprisingly warm days of winter months. He called the location “the Mandala”

Most of Haskell’s observations were biological, but he made forays into the realm of physical sciences. He examined ice and snow, and commented on the six sided snowflake. Haskell described how Johannes Kepler, discover of night sky wonders, took a break from astronomy and examined snowflakes. Kepler rejected the theory of the atom, regaining popularity in his day. He examined the pomegranate and the wax cells in bee hives, commented on the repeating six sided structure in each.

Haskell says that Kepler might have had more luck had he accepted the existence of atoms. I am not so certain that this would have led to the discovery of the six-sided ring formed by six water molecules. Kepler would also have to have known about the weak bond between the hydrogen atoms of one molecule and the oxygen atom of an adjoining molecule, credited with the hexagonal structure.

Some purveyors of health food have recently discovered this fact about water, and begun marketing “hexagonal water.” Caveat Emptor, all water is hexagonal or not, depending on temperature. Any consumer can have hexagonal water in quantities equal to the capacity of their ice maker.  Lest some defender of the faith take this as an attack on health foods generally, let me state, for the record, it is not. Some health food claims are certainly legitimate, but every form of business has practitioners both honest and otherwise. Some are mere hucksters, P.T. Barnums, looking for those proverbial suckers, one of which is born every minute.

The hexagonal ring structure makes ice expand as it freezes and cools. This is why ice floats on top of the water. I have seen fish trapped in ice and apparently frozen solid. When the ice thaws they may revive and skid about on their fins on top of the ice until they find a hole and return to the pond from whence they came. The sight of fish swimming in puddles atop the ice astonished me.

On this particular day though, I observed the clouds at sunset, saw a pink wash from a setting sun. Of course, the sunset itself is never visible here on the east side of the mountain. Each time I came inside to work on a project, I looked out the window and was back outside. I did not want to miss one minute of the fading pink light on snow.

Nature’s Bookshelf

By Ray Zimmerman

Edward Abbey

            “Let us throw metaphysics to the dogs. I never heard a Mountain Lion bawling about the fate of his soul.” Edward Abbey wrote those words in the introduction to the final (1986) edition of his classic book Desert Solitaire. These words are an appropriate introduction to the author. His books are set in the world of sandstone under foot, a cowboy on his horse, a raft on a wild river, and the embrace of two lovers in the night.

            Abbey was born January 29, 1927 near the town of Home, Pennsylvania. He died March 14, 1989 in Tucson, Arizona. Between those two dates he served in World War II, received a master’s degree in philosophy, authored twenty books, and married five times. Three marriages ended in divorce. His third marriage, to Judy Pepper, ended when she died of leukemia. Her death inspired the book Black Sun.  His final marriage, to Clarke Cartwright, ended with his death in 1989.

Abbey worked as a park ranger, a fire tower lookout, a journalist, a newspaper editor, a bus driver, and finally as a university professor. The years with the Park Service and the Forest Service provided much of his source material. The land itself not only provides the setting for his works, but emerges as a major character. Abbey loved the red rock sandstone mesas and canyons, and especially the rivers. His connection to the rivers is perhaps best stated in “Down the River,” a chapter of Desert Solitaire. In this chapter he traveled down the Glen Canyon portion of the Colorado with his friend Ralph Newsome. That trip was just before completion of the Glen Canyon Dam, nemesis of all that Abbey held sacred in nature, and the creation of Lake Powell, termed a sewage lagoon in Abbey’s writings.

The phrase Down the River emerged again a few years later as the title of a book. In this work Abbey employed several meanings of the phrase, including rivers as symbolic of the passage of time, descriptions of float trips physically going down several rivers, and a statement that both man and nature have been sold down the river.

This last sentiment is reiterated in his novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, in which he is said to have initiated the term eco-defense. It may have inspired environmental activism through direct action. It certainly gave us the monkey wrench as a symbol for direct intervention. Some of Abbey’s detractors claim that it is a fictionalized account of actions that the author encouraged if not actually participated in. Although Abbey was known to remove a few survey stakes from development projects, he himself maintained that The Monkey Wrench Gang was a strictly fictional work written solely for the entertainment of his readers.

This statement has since been supported by Ingrid Eisenstadt. She was the real life woman whom the character Mizz (sic) Bonnie Abbzug “not related to the senator” was almost certainly modeled after. Her verbal portrait of Abbey and their sometime life together was published in “Abbey’s Picnic,” Sierra magazine, 2002.

Abbey’s work is often cited as forecasting a future where wilderness continues to be eroded by the work of man. His most prophetic passage however was perhaps the final paragraph in a chapter of Desert Solitaire titled “The Dead Man at Grandview Point.” In this chapter, Abbey joined a search party to find an elderly man missing in the desert for two days. Coming home from this job he records his feelings of identifying with the dead man. The passage prefigures his own illegal burial in an unmarked grave in the desert by sympathetic friends carrying out his last request, years later:

“I feel myself sinking into the landscape, fixed in place like a stone, like a tree, a small motionless shape of vague outline, desert colored, and with the wings of imagination look down at myself with the eyes of the bird, watching a human figure that becomes smaller, smaller in the receding landscape as the bird rises into the evening – a man at a table near a twinkling campfire, surrounded by a rolling wasteland of stone and dune and sandstone monuments, the wasteland surrounded by dark canyons and the course of rivers and mountain ranges on a vast plateau stretching across Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, and beyond this plateau more deserts and greater mountains, the Rockies in dusk, the Sierra Nevadas shining in their late afternoon, and farther and farther yet, the darkened East, the gleaming Pacific, the curving margins of the great earth itself, and beyond earth that ultimate world of sun and stars whose bounds we cannot discover.”

A few books by and about Edward Abbey

Desert Solitaire (Final Edition)

Edward Abbey

University of Arizona Press, 1986

Desert Solitaire was drawn from the author’s journal entries written during two years when he served as a park ranger at Arches National Monument. It was first published by McGraw-Hill, 1968. Previous editions went through several printings.

Down the River

Edward Abbey

E.P. Dutton, New York, 1982

This book includes four sets of journal entries written while running rivers on white water rafts. It also includes essays on natural history, politics, people and places he has known, and two book reviews.

The Monkey Wrench Gang

Edward Abbey

Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2000

Four environmental activists meet on a rafting trip on the Colorado River. They hatch a plot to sabotage projects they deem to be environmentally harmful.  Avon Books, 1976        

Black Sun

Edward Abbey

Simon and Shuster, 1971

In this book a park ranger falls in love with a beautiful woman.

Slumgullion Stew, an Edward Abbey Reader

Edward Abbey

E.P. Dutton, New York, 1984

This work contains excerpts from several of Abbey’s books.

Epitaph for a Desert Anarchist:

The Life and Legacy of Edward Abbey

James Bishop, Jr.

Athenium, New York, 1994

This work is a biography. The author had access to Abbey’s personal papers.

Edward Abbey, a Life

James M. Cahalan

The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2001

This is a biography.

Fiery Gizzard: Voices from the Wilderness

Mary Patten Priestly

This unique book blends history and natural history to tell the story of the Fiery Gizzard, now a part of South Cumberland State Park. The Author edits The Plant Press, newsletter of the Sewanee

Herbarium, so the emphasis on native plants and botanical rarities is not surprising.

She also reveals the geologic history of “the Giz” and speaks somewhat of the fauna, but her real story is one of people. From Bartrum and other early explorers, to modern day naturalists, artists, and citizens, Priestly explains why these people found the Fiery Gizzard an important place, and sought to live nearby and, eventually, to preserve it as a park for future generations.

This short book is an easy read, but fascinating for anyone interested in conservation or the outdoors.

Diary of a Citizen Scientist: chasing tiger beetles and other new ways of seeing the world

Sharman Apt. Russell

Oregon State University Press

2014

Sharman Russell teaches creative writing at the college level and has authored several books of natural history, with topics ranging from butterflies to flowers to archeology.  In her most recent book, Diary of a Citizen Scientist, she documents her efforts to support scientific research. Russell presents the material in a format accessible to general readers, who may not be as familiar with the idea of citizen science.

Throughout the book, Russell weaves three narrative threads together into a unified picture of citizen science. She begins with her own research on tiger beetles in which she was the first person to observe all three larval stages of the Western Red-bellied Tiger Beetle. To this strand, she adds lyrical descriptions of her home and research area in New Mexico, near the Rio Grande valley. In the third narrative thread she presents descriptions of numerous citizen opportunities. These include projects from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology with which bird watchers are already familiar.

                                                                                                                              

Other projects she describes include Nature’s Notebook, which asks citizen scientists to observe the times when various species of trees reach the bud stage and leaf out or certain wildflowers come into bloom. Some are computer based such as the video game Foldit, which helps biochemists working on protein synthesis and Galaxy Zoo, in which participants review telescope photos to classify distant galaxies. Russell even gives some examples of projects which can be applied in the schools, and describes how her daughter used a schoolyard bird survey and a project to examine fossil evidence in soil that had surrounded a dinosaur.

She also sparks the imagination with inspiring quotations from scientists such as entomologist Dick Vane-Wright of the London Museum of Natural History: “You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet.” This is a jumping off point for the book, but it also sums up her enthusiasm which brought about the hard work she did to complete her project, work any citizen scientist comes to understand, in the hours of tabulating data and confirming results.

Wild

Propelled by grief and the dissolution of her family, Cheryl Strayed impulsively decided to hike a long portion of the Pacific Crest Trail. The untimely death of her mother, the driving force that held her family together, devastated her at age 22. Her loving siblings and step father became distant and the family dissolved, as did her own marriage.

She had been camping and canoeing before, but had no experience backpacking. She had not even walked with a full pack to prepare for this adventure. Readers may be sympathetic or incredulous as the story of this woman unfolds with tales of her shouldering a too heavy pack as she set out alone to cover several hundred miles. Along the way she crossed a snow field with an ice axe. She also encountered a variety of people, most of whom were generous and helpful. One experienced backpacker emptied her pack and split the belongings into two piles - items she should keep and those she could do without. For example, he suggested she keep the ice axe but not the folding saw.

Strayed refers to herself as the girl with the hole in her heart, but along the way she gains both physical and emotional strength. She includes flashbacks about her history of drug use and infidelities, which put her on a trajectory that ended in divorce. Her remarks are candid and confessional without penitence, which will undoubtedly put off some readers. 

Some reviewers also responded negatively because the book is tightly focused on the author and her experience of the trail, some might be tempted to use the word self-absorbed.  One went so far as to say that it could just as easily have been written in a detox ward. I disagree. Admittedly, she neither extols the beauty of nature which daily surrounded her, nor exhorts her readers to preserve the vanishing wilderness. The narrative is about the challenge of the trail as a transformation experience.

Most readers will find the book is a great read, a well written narrative of a quest for wholeness. She is deeply motivated by the challenge of the trail and somewhat by the beauty of the natural world. In the end, she achieves a spiritual core, albeit in non-traditional spirituality, and is changed for the better by the experiences she records. I give this book five stars.

The Gospel of Nature

John Burroughs

Applewood Books

ISBN 155709-131-5

I do not know that the bird has taught me any valuable lesson. Indeed, I do not go to nature to be taught. I go for enjoyment and companionship. I go to bathe in her as in a sea; I go to give my eyes and ears and other senses a free, clean field and to tone up my spirits by her “primal sanities.”

            So begins chapter 3 of The Gospel of Nature a long essay originally included in a book of essays by American naturalist John Burroughs. The publishers at Applewood Books thoughtfully republished this essay in a stand alone 44 page booklet which, according to the introduction, describes …man’s relationship to nature and nature’s relationship to religion.

At age 75 Burroughs was still actively farming and writing. He credited his vigor to a close relationship with nature, a theme woven throughout the essay. He begins by extolling the health benefits of nature for the senses and the body.

He claims inspiration for the essay came from a parson who asked him to speak on the topic. He replies, in part, with this statement: The forms and creeds of religion change, but the sentiment of religion – the wonder and reverence and love we feel in the presence of the inscrutable universe – persists.

This quotation describes the spiritual view of a naturalist, one in total awe of the universe and its majesty. Unlike Shakespeare, Burroughs sees no “Sermons in Stones,” but lessons from history that teach us an appropriate path.

He concludes Part I with a description of a sap bucket left beside a maple tree through winter and spring. Cut off from the rest of nature, the bucket has filled with sap and rainwater and the bodies of drowned animals. He kicked over the fetid mixture with the assurance that the soil would absorb every part and make it pure and sweet.

The story is no less than a metaphor for his view of man. Cut off from nature we decay. Reunited with nature we are made whole.

Part II is as close to a “how to,” a guide for aspiring naturalists as Burroughs gets in this essay. He states that he has not “studied nature so much as visited with her.” He does not aspire to a scientific field study, but enjoyment, though he admits that knowledge will enhance that enjoyment. His delightful story of the ichneumon wasp is but one example of how his knowledge structures his enjoyment.

Burroughs’ gospel is the simple mysticism of the naturalist. It is a belief in the wisdom of nature with little thought to the supernatural. It is a belief that all things happen, not according to some grand plan, but according to what works best.

Earth National Park

Poems by Dennis Fritzinger

Poetry Vortex Publishing

Crescent City, California

if I knew how to do it

I’d arm all the bears

so there’d be bear militias

in the mountains somewheres

So begins the poem “Support Your Right,” a personal favorite from Earth National Park. In this short volume of poetry, Dennis Fritzinger introduces numerous nonhuman protagonists such as “Mother Vulture,” “Angry Red Squirrel,” and “Ambassador Frog.”

Most common of all are the bears. A Black Bear with a pilfered radio listens to the traffic, spying on the humans. A human in a restaurant eats blackberry jam and turns into a bear. The bears in “Support Your Right” tote guns and protect the wilderness from humans.

Several of the poems are polemics on direct environmental action, while others are statements of the author’s earth centered philosophy. These two threads are interwoven with the poems written from the animals’ various points of view. Each of the three threads compliments and amplifies the other to make a unique whole.

Earth National Park is a delightful collection of poems by Dennis Fritzinger, moderator of the Warrior Poets Society list serve on Yahoo Groups and editor of the Warrior Poets Society page in the Earth First! Journal. From the introduction, “A New Pledge,” to the final poem “The Yellowstone Fire,” Dennis emphasizes his philosophy of “nature knows best.”

“Vermin: A Notebook”

Poems can stop bulldozers.

John Kinsella

Poetry Foundation

http://www.poetryfoundation.org, and in Poetry, December, 2009

For me, poetry has no point in existing if it’s not to be a prompt or aid to political and ethical change. This is not to say that a poem should be political or ethical instruction, but rather that it might engender a dialogue between the poem itself and the reader / listener, between itself and other poems and texts and between all of these and a broader public (whatever that might be). I see myself as a poet activist – every time I write a poem, it is an act of resistance to the state, the myriad hierarchies of control, and the human urge to conquer our natural surroundings.

Though this quotation sums up Kinsella’s argument, it is not the point of departure for his essay. He begins with a description of a trip to town, “the shire,” in his native Australia. From that description he abruptly transitions to gunshots fired outside his house the previous Friday night. Fox hunters have crossed the public land of a refuge and intruded onto his private property in search of their quarry. When he attempts to intervene, a shot is fired in his direction and he summons the police, feeling his family is in danger. He bitterly observes that these sportsmen are likely staunch defenders of private property rights which they have now violated.

            Kinsella then describes a Saturday trip to the shire where again shots ring out. This time, a group is shooting corellas, a species of cockatoo that have congregated in the town’s trees and are considered a nuisance.

            Through the point and counterpoint of these descriptions he weaves his own story as one trained in the sciences, living on the land outside the town, and carefully constructing poems as a response to the world around him. His poems though, go further than describing and responding to the world around him. They are calls to action. In his words, he is …resisting through poetry the industry of pleasure and control that comes from hunting and exploitation of the environment, I am, also, I believe, writing the survival and liberty of animals (including humans).

The Creation

New York

ISBN 978-0-393-33048-9 pbk

            Pastor, I am grateful for your attention. As a scientist who has spent a lifetime studying the creation, I have done my best here to brief you and others on subjects I hope will be more a part of out common concern. My foundation of reference has been the culture of science and some of secularism based on science, as I understand them. From that foundation I have focused on the interaction of three problems that affect everyone: the decline of the living environment, the inadequacy of scientific education, and the moral confusions caused by the exponential growth of biology. In order to solve these problems, I’ve argued, it will be necessary to find common ground on which the powerful forces of religion and science can be joined. The best place to start is the stewardship of life.

            So begins Chapter 17, the final chapter, of Edward O. Wilson’s book, The Creation. Wilson wrote the book as a letter to a Southern Baptist preacher, and has no fear of directly referring to their differences. He begins with a reference to his own early experiences in the faith, his departure from it, and their common roots as Southerners.

            Within the framework of this unique approach, Wilson describes subjects already known to his readers: the importance of nature as our home, the destruction of nature by habitat loss, invasive species and other causes, and the love of nature (Biophilia). The Creation is a book long appeal for science and religion to find common ground and protect the natural world.

Desert Solitire

Desert Solitaire

Edward Abbey

“What do the coyotes mean when they yodel at the moon? What are the dolphins trying so patiently to tell us? Precisely what did these two enraptured gopher snakes have in mind when they came gliding toward my eyes over the naked sandstone? If I had been as capable of trust as I am susceptible to fear I might have learned something new, or some truth so old we have all forgotten it!”

The above passage appears near the beginning of Desert Solitaire, the first of Edward Abbey’s books to catch my attention and reinforce my love of wilderness. His descriptions of the parched landscape in and around Arches National Monument are both eloquent and revealing whether he is describing the arches themselves, the rivers and springs, the wildlife, or the rocky terrain. The descriptions reveal that Abbey was a first rate naturalist.

The book, Desert Solitaire, does not stop there. Abbey also included an angry polemic on mechanized (he uses the term industrial) tourism, decrying the destruction of natural parks by roads and motors. He felt that the parks are best seen on foot.

The book also includes stories of the people of this desert land. Abbey appears to be sympathetic with the solitary prospector, unable to compete with corporate mining interests, the small rancher put out of business by agribusiness, the unemployed cowboys, and the Indians. For a man sometimes labeled a misanthrope, he includes a lot of sympathetic stories of these people.

My favorite of all the essays and stories in this lovely book though is simply titled “The Moon Eyed Horse.” In this narrative, Abbey walks up a box canyon trying to recapture a feral horse, blind in one eye and roaming the land after escape from a local ranch. The horse lived on its own for several years. He fails to capture “Ole’ Moon Eye,” and seems sympathetic to the horse, almost appearing to envy its wild state.

Though Abbey’s work is often cited as forecasting a future where the work of man continues to erode wilderness, his most prophetic passages are perhaps those in the chapter titled “The Dead Man at Grandview Point.” In this chapter, Abbey has joined a search party to find an elderly man missing in the desert for two days. Coming home from this job he recorded his feelings of identifying with the dead man. The passage prefigures his own illegal burial in an unmarked grave in the desert by sympathetic friends carrying out his last request, years later:

“I feel myself sinking into the landscape, fixed in place like a stone, like a tree, a small motionless shape of vague outline, desert colored, and with the wings of imagination look down at myself with the eyes of the bird, watching a human figure that becomes smaller, smaller in the receding landscape as the bird rises into the evening – a man at a table near a twinkling campfire, surrounded by a rolling wasteland of stone and dune and sandstone monuments, the wasteland surrounded by dark canyons and the course of rivers and mountain ranges on a vast plateau stretching across Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, and beyond this plateau more deserts and greater mountains, the Rockies in dusk, the Sierra Nevadas shining in their late afternoon, and farther and farther yet, the darkened East, the gleaming Pacific, the curving margins of the great earth itself, and beyond earth that ultimate world of sun and stars whose bounds we cannot discover.”

            - Reviewed by Ray Zimmerman

The Canoeist (Nonfiction)

John Manuel

ISBN 0-97189-747-6

I remember rolling under the canoe; the way the water muffled the roar of the rapid and softened the sun’s glare.  All around me were bubbles, millions and millions of them, rushing along at the same speed.   We are like this – souls traveling through space.  We are born in the tumult of the river, carried along by forces we cannot control.  And we’re also beautiful in the way we hold the light, murmuring to one another on this journey toward the surface, our short spiraling lives.

I stayed under for a long time, safe from the waves crashing overhead. The water ran warm and deep. There was no need to panic, but my air was running out. I kicked out of the thigh straps and burst into daylight. –Page 208

The quotation from page 208 is but one example of the excellence of the narrative prose which fills John Manuel’s book from beginning to end.  The river in this passage was Tennessee’s Ocoee, portrayed as an ultimate challenge for canoeists, a river generally reserved for Kayaks and White Water Rafts.

The author’s trip down the Ocoee is the climax to a journey that begins on the peaceful waters of the Chagrin River near his parent’s home in Cleveland, Ohio.  Along the way he canoed such well known waterways as the Allagash (Maine), the Nantahala (North Carolina), and the Chattooga (Georgia).  This last was the whitewater backdrop for the movie Deliverance based on James Dickey’s novel of the same title.

The Canoeist is neither a how to manual for boaters nor a simple recounting of whitewater adventures, though many adventures appear among the stories.  Manuel skillfully weaves in the story of his family and his career along the way.  Within the pages he recounts emotional distance from his father, a hard nosed businessman who taught him canoeing skills but never understood his career path as a conservationist working for nonprofit organizations, or his later decision to become a writer.

Manuel also recounts the friendships he gained along the way and the courtship of his wife Cathy, a strong canoeist in her own right.  He tells the reader about his son and daughter, and his determination to maintain a healthy relationship with them and not repeat the separation between him and his father.

Manuel’s ability to weave these many stories into a unified whole reveal his skill as a gifted writer. The canoeist is an enjoyable read.

Meditating with Annie Dillard by Ray Zimmerman

This profile appeared as the installment of my Nature’s Bookshelf column in Volume 8 Issue 6 of Hellbender Press (November/December, 2006), Knoxville, Tennessee. The publication was named for a large species of salamander (The Hellbender), native to the American southeast, and has since ceased publication.

Henry David Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately and was largely ignored as an author by his own generation. Unlike Thoreau, Annie Dillard lived in a cabin on Tinker Creek and emerged a Pulitzer Prize winning author. Although Dillard has been compared to Thoreau and the other New England Transcendentalists, many reviewers see her as more similar to Melville.

Many natural history writers concern themselves with the how – the great question of all science. Dillard is concerned with why, a question more at home in theology than in science. She comments in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that some people extol the thriftiness of nature where the leaves of trees are recycled into soil to grow more plants. She then asks if it would be more efficient to keep the leaves on the trees in the first place.

Dillard is horrified at the wastefulness of nature. She notes that many insects lay thousands of eggs, only to have most of them eaten, sometimes by the parent. She compares this scheme to a railroad company building thousands of locomotives and turning them loose on a section of track that can accommodate only three. At the end of their experiment, the company would learn that only three locomotives were necessary. She imagines a board of directors chastising their managers for running the company in such a wasteful way. She then states that nature is wasteful in exactly such a manner.

Although this line of thought seems to put Dillard outside the mainstream of nature writers, she is in fact a keen observer of the natural world. Early in the pages of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek she sees a frog skin shrivel in the grasp of a diving beetle. She observes a shed snake skin with a knot in it, a creek overflowing its banks and flooding the neighborhood, and a praying mantis laying eggs. She augments these observations with remembrances of her childhood experiences. She recalls viewing pond life through a microscope, and watching a moth hatch inside a glass jar.

In Holy the Firm Dillard continues her metaphysical probing. She asks what the relationship is between the temporal and the eternal. In the first chapter, she seems to be echoing the statements of Saint Francis of Assisi, who said “Praised be You our Lord through mother earth who governs and sustains us.” In the second chapter a child is badly burned in an airplane accident, and Dillard wrestles with the eternal question as to why the innocent suffer. She seems to receive the very answer received by the Old Testament character, Job. The answer is that suffering is part of the world and that we are too small and insignificant in view of the beauty and vastness of the universe to question its nature.

After publishing one book each in the genres of literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and memoir, Dillard returns to the narrative nonfiction style in her 1999 book, For the Time Being. Here she records travels in China and Israel. She observes Chinese peasants working in a field and a crab digging for water near a Kibbutz. She describes clouds and a tsunami off the coast of Bangladesh. She describes the extraordinary lives of the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Tielhard de Chardin and the Ukrainian Hasidic Rabbi Baal Shem Tov.  She continues to ask why suffering is part of the human condition, and why evil exists.

Aside from her many books, Dillard has published several poems and short works of fiction and nonfiction in periodicals. These are listed on her official web site, http://www.anniedillard.com. The site also includes a list of derivative works: paintings, music, and one act plays carried out by others but inspired by her work. Most of these are derived from Holy the Firm.

Dillard’s writing style is perhaps best illustrated by a selection from the first chapter of Holy the Firm. She had been reading by candle light one night when a moth, drawn to the light, got caught in the wax at the top of her candle. It was gone before she could respond. The following passage is a hallmark of observation and narrative:

“And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The month’s head was fire. She burned for two hours until I blew her out.

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning – only glowing within, like a building glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.”

Sidebar – Dillard’s Published Works

Tickets for a Prayer Wheel - Poems

University of Missouri Press, 1974

Several poems have titles indicating natural history, but are actually metaphysical. The title poem is an invitation for the eternal to break into the temporal.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Nonfiction Narrative

Harpers Magazine Press, 1974

Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction

This book received mixed reviews when it was released. Eudora Welty, the great Southern writer, said that she was uncertain of Dillard’s intent and that the writing left something to be desired. A portion of her review, and segments from other reviews, are available in Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Volume 3 (Gale Research Company, Detroit, Michigan).

Holy the Firm – Meditations

Harper and Row 1977

In this work she asked what relationship the temporal has to the eternal. She then asks why the innocent must suffer.

Living by Fiction – Literary Criticism

Harper and Row, 1982

This book is a technical work primarily useful to graduate students in university literature programs.

Teaching a Stone to Talk – A Collection of Essays

Harper and Row 1982

This book includes essays on natural history and metaphysics. The essay on the Galapagos Islands is an excellent investigation into creation and evolution.

Encounters with Chinese Writers – Journalism

Wesleyan University Press, 1984

The author identifies this work as jolly journalism.

An American Childhood – Memoir

Harper and Row, 1987

The author tells her own story.

The Writing Life – Narrative Nonfiction

Harper and Row 1989

This book includes some practical tips for writers. The author advises writers to edit ruthlessly and to throw out unnecessary prose, even if it is that on which they worked hardest. Several chapters appeared previously as essays in periodicals.

The Living – A Novel

Harper Collins, 1992

This fictional work is set on Bellingham Bay in Washington State.

The Annie Dillard Reader – Selected Reprints

Harper Collins, 1994

Mornings Like This – Found Poems

Harper Collins, 1995

Dillard mined old books on natural history, theology, and navigation for these lines. They are rearranged into poems. The meaning of the poems is far different from that of the original text.

For the Time Being –Narrative

Knopf, 1999

After working in several other genres, Dillard returned to the nonfiction narrative for this book. The author weaves several themes together into a unified whole. The book includes narratives on birth, death, the nature of evil and current events. She includes stories of the Jesuit Palentoligist Teilhard de Chardin and the Hasidic Rabbi Baal Shem Tov who expressed religious fervor by dancing.