Near-Earth Object
By John Shoptaw
Unbound Edition Press | 2024 | 116 pages
John Shoptaw is a poet and one of today’s smartest and wisest ecological thinkers. His intelligence shows in essays such as “Why Ecopoetry?” and, more recently, “The Poetry of Our Climate.” Few contemporary writers so thoughtfully braid together literary reflection with issues of climate change, activism, natural systems, consciousness (human and non-human alike), and the relationship between hope and despair. His wisdom is articulated in how he meets his subject. Confronting the planetary crisis, he writes with a blend of grief and grace, conscience and wonder. His latest poetry collection, Near-Earth Object, should be read by everyone who loves poetry and the earth it speaks for.
Many of Shoptaw’s poems describe the struggle to stay present and grounded amid the catastrophes of a warming world, a theme vividly rendered in “The Fall Equinox”:
The Fall Equinox
I missed it, the instant the equatorial
intersects the ecliptic plane,
and night or day gives way
to day or night.
The Mexican weeping bamboo
is flowering everywhere on Earth
at once, and September’s dwindling
crickets are stridulating too stridently.
I count to fifteen, and they chirp me
the temperature: 89 in the dark,
which I take to mean
You will find you drove past
the tipping point sometime
back. You must have missed it
in the strobe-lit red-fir sundown
of Donner Pass. No point then
in easing your foot off the pedal.
From then on, any turn you take
leads only to another stopgap.
But I won’t be going there
just yet. I need to tell
somebody about the turkling.
Pecking for bamboo seeds,
it finds itself on the wrong
side of the deer fence
and can’t locate the tabby
|door back. Blup! Blup!
it reminds itself as it
paces back and forth.
But it isn’t panicking.
I’m here to tell you.
It’s coping.
It’s easy to “panic” and despair, imagining that every climate remedy will prove just “another stopgap.” However, the speaker resists defeatism: “I won’t be going there / just yet.” He is buoyed by the impulse to share, with any friendly “somebody,” a scene from his Berkeley backyard: a turkling has squeezed through a hole in the fence to feed on seeds but can’t find its way out again. Instead of panicking, the little bird copes by staying alert and trusting its own resourcefulness. The speaker copes by following the turkling’s example: resisting panic and “remind[ing]” himself to stay present—before sharing this lesson and poetic vision with the reader. The speaker finds consolation through artistic expression, which also helps cultivate the relationships that underlie ecological stewardship.
Shoptaw contends that we owe it to the earth—and to ourselves, as residents—to cope. That may sound like a modest, even inadequate goal. Yet his poems convincingly argue that coping is not a resignation but a necessary practice. If our species is ever to become responsible stewards of the planet, we must tend our inner soil: nurturing poetic sensitivity, wonder, imaginative empathy, communal bonds, openness to uncertainty, and a grounded, step-by-step presence. Such qualities guard against burnout. They send down roots sturdy enough to sustain meaningful engagement with the world.
Shoptaw claims, “Hope holds despair as much as despair holds hope.” These poems plumb hope and despair, viewing them not as antagonists but as entwined states. True hope isn’t naïve or blind to catastrophe: it makes space for despair, holding and acknowledging it. Despair often flickers with hope—if only in the willingness to continue witnessing, feeling, caring, and mourning. Indeed, in Shoptaw’s reimagining of the Eden story, the Tree of Life (standing for hope) and the Tree of Knowledge (standing for tragedy) merge at the base into a single organism. From “The Tree in the Midst”:
the unforbidden animals—indohyus,
field mice, Persian ground jays,
worms, salamanders, bees and so forth—
ate as always from the tree of life
and also from the tree of knowing
good fruit from fruit gone bad.
Yet:
down among
the butterfly weeds the two trees
become one trunk.
One could write volumes about how Shoptaw consistently upends our habitual ways of knowing and seeing—how he decenters humans and human language while widening our sense of kinship with animals and the entire biosphere. Yet, I’d like to turn my attention from content to craft, praising the beauty, formal mastery, and range of his verse. It abounds in sumptuous lyrical passages, like this description of a scaly anteater in “Pangolin Scales”:
the pangolin, streaming
at high night from its stone-
lipped burrow, trespassing in Belgian
Congo moonlight, gibbous as a bell curve
from its paginated tail to its sinuous
gummed tongue, prolonged
for trickling down ant-
slickened trunk
crevices,
would
swirl
headlong down
the impenetrable drain it
makes of itself (Malay pengguling:
up-rolling thing), an involute, inexplicable
globe, plate lapping overlapping scalloped plate.
Throughout the collection, Shoptaw’s diction ranges widely, from vernacular to operatic. Stanzas like these are pure aria. Others lean plain and blunt; in “Back Here,” the citizens of the Missouri Bootheel (where Shoptaw was raised) collectively confess their efforts to cope:
We know. The earth is dying. We get that.
Dying of natural causes. Of COPD and such like.
We believe things were meant for the best.
They just didn’t work out that way.
Still, back here, we live in affirmation.
Like you do. In fear and affirmation.
Naturally, we’ll do what we can.
Only please, don’t ask us
to change our climate for yours.
Shoptaw resists a tidy moral judgment of the speakers’ rejection of climate science. Instead, the writing’s persuasive power lies in its textured voice: hesitant confession (“we get that”), Missourian Bootheel argot (“and such like”), gentle evasions couched as affirmations, and the syntactical yoking together of “fear and affirmation.” These contrasts help the reader recognize and perhaps even empathize with how the speakers’ defensive pride masks their resignation.
Startlingly, Shoptaw places the predicament we all face—holding both “fear and affirmation”—in the mouths of climate-change deniers. In such a moment, the project of Near-Earth Object comes into focus: these poems avoid collapsing into judgment, discovering kinship through our shared anxieties. Shoptaw reveals how the very tension between despair and hope—provided we remain awake to it—can form the crucible where a deeper ecological consciousness and praxis are forged.
Jeremy Graves is a co-author of the bestselling book on meditation and cognitive psychology, The Mind Illuminated (Simon & Schuster in North America, Random House in Asia). His first collection of poems, Hallelujah Junction, is forthcoming. Along with Addie Mahmassani and Dion O’Reilly, he is an editor of En•Trance, a journal about poetry and altered states. His work has appeared in αntiphony, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere. He has received grants from the University of California, Berkeley and the Community of Writers and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Montaigne Medal, and the 2024 Saints & Sinners Poetry Prize. A clinical psychologist, he lives in New York City. Find more at jeremygraves.net.
Header photo of pangolin by Vickey Chauhan, courtesy Shutterstock.
