The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders
Edited by Luisa A. Igloria, Aileen Cassinetto, and David Hassler
Paloma Press | 2025 | 390 pages
The Poets for Science project, which is both a traveling art exhibit and a kind of movement, was founded several years ago by Jane Hirshfield and David Hassler. Hirshfield once described the connection between poetry and science in a way that highlights their shared purpose:
Poetry and science are allies, not opposites. Both are instruments of discovery, and together they make the two feet of one walking. We can only weigh the full meaning of facts by how we feel about them. Feelings are meaningful and useful to us because they emerge from the truths of this shifting, astonishing world. Poetry and science each seek to ground our lives in both what exists and the sense of the large, of mystery and awe. Every scientist I know is grounded in curiosity, wonder, the spirit of exploration, the spirit of service. As is every poet.
This conversation between poetry and science, and David Hassler’s involvement, helped to pave the way for a wonderful new book project focusing on the same theme. The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders is an anthology that includes over 200 poems gleaned from more than 1,300 submissions. The book includes a diverse cadre of emerging poets along with renowned artists like Hirshfield, Camille T. Dungy, Noemi Shihab Nye, and Arthur Sze. The three poet-editors––Hassler, Luisa A. Igloria, and Aileen Cassinetto––conceived the book as an outgrowth of the National Nature Assessment Initiative (2022), which encouraged such creative endeavors as a way of responding to the most pressing environmental threats.
Given the dire stakes of the ongoing climate debacle, the challenge for such an anthology was to both educate and inspire. “The nature of our times,” writes Cassinetto in the introduction, “demands more than just our survival. It calls for joy, which is our most profound act of resistance.”
What readers will find is that this “joyful resistance” springs from the poets’ radical attentiveness to the world around them—a sparkling vitality that pulses through every line. Their language miraculously awakens the eyes, ears, nose, and fingers: to bees and bark and bears. Or to how a few blades of switchgrass, or a kiting hawk, might describe the wind. As I read, I found myself longing to remember my own place in the natural world, and to recover my tech-dulled senses, and waning response abilities.
The first stanza of Marion Starling Boyer’s poem, “Tinkers Creek State Park,” suggests this kind of sensory awakening or joyful attentiveness:
Fog in the fens.
In the deep end of winter
branches black and bare,
mist, and a wisp of steam
rising from a beaver lodge.
Everything turtle and toady
is still. Only a rustle of wings
deeper in.
The writing here is focused and precise—revelatory rather than expository. Concrete and exemplary rather than abstract and analytical. Which suggests a worthwhile reminder for the “poet activist”: we have to see the world before we can save it. Like poetry and science, art and activism are deeply intertwined.
Yet, while some poems focus more on the saving than the seeing, they too are acts of radical attention. Consider the first stanza of Patrick Dixon’s “Rationale”:
We never meant for it to happen.
Perhaps that is why we resist
owning the responsibility of it:
that we, like children, didn’t mean to.
We didn’t mean to spill our garbage
so far abroad it eddies in distant ocean currents,
far from land or civilization. The plastic cups
were blown out of the pickup by the wind.
At 70 miles an hour, who had time to stop
and retrieve them? We never thought about where
they went after that, specks in the rearview,
bouncing across the road toward the beach.
These contrasting images—Boyer’s “branches black and bare” and Dunn’s plastic cups (trash) bouncing along the road—illustrate the intersection of art and activism, of seeing and saving the world. It’s a reminder that both are crucial in the work of environmental justice, and it is what makes The Nature of Our Times so powerful. By bringing together these elements, the anthology encourages both reflection and action, making the work itself an act of creative resistance.
Tom Montgomery Fate is the author of six books of creative nonfiction. The most recent is The Long Way Home, a travel memoir.
Read an excerpt of Tom Montgomery Fate’s The Long Way Home, “Over Time,” appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Sergei Tokmakov, courtesy Pixabay.
