San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
STATE LINES California Poetry
Traditionally, pastoral poems feature someone confronting nature. Think of Emily Dickinson’s “narrow fellow in the grass,” or Dylan Thomas rhapsodizing on Fern Hill. The landscapes in these poems are unpopulated, close to pristine. Tiffany Higgins shows us that no matter where we locate ourselves, nature is always within reach. In fact, sometimes it’s reaching for us. In “there is one lone hawk who seems,” Higgins admires a hawk “perfect in flight” just outside her apartment window in Oakland. There’s a wonderful imaginative development toward the end of the poem, in which Higgins imagines herself outside as a tree, a potential roost that might commune with the feral hawk. Her poem is a breathtaking contemporary pastoral.
to do just fine over the city I catch its upturned V cresting below wires above apartment buildings at first
I think it is a drone so perfect is its flight that driftless soar & circle what must it search for here amid cement gardens the vole absent — me at my little table threading lines while it is doing the tough work of living perhaps a mouse a rat some blessed carrion the luckiest kind of dying it has chosen to take up residence here bordered by boulevard
& urban lake every time I happen to look up from my tapping to eye it who moves like no other
I feel a timber of me go off and lean with it into the cindered wind
From “Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California,” edited by Lucille Lang Day and Ruth Nolan (Oakland: Scarlet Tanager Books, 2018). This new anthology will debut at the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival on Saturday, Oct. 13, in Berkeley’s Civic Center Park.
Tiffany Higgins is the author of “The Apparition at Fort Bragg” and “And Aeneas Stares Into Her Helmet.” She lives in Oakland.
David Roderick is the author of the poetry collections “Blue Colonial” and “The Americans.” He is co-founder of Left Margin Lit: A Home for the Literary Arts, in Berkeley.