Dear Friends,

Yesterday, my friend and one of my very favorite writers, Robert Macfarlane, launched his new book, Is a River Alive? in the US. And, of course, I was teaching, so I missed it. But I wanted to put the book on your radar and revive this piece I wrote for Wonder Wednesday, the series of weekly pieces on my PhD research into wonder that I posted throughout my first year of Poetry Today. (If you’re a paid subscriber, you can access the full archive and revisit those essays.)

In honor of Rob, here’s an excerpt of a chapter on how our understanding and experiences of wonder can work in service of preservation efforts, and how poetry may be the invaluable missing link in helping us feel up to the task. If this topic interests you, I wrote a piece for The Poetry Review on wilderness and bewilderment and the need to protect wild places.

I would also like to draw your attention to

Now, an excerpt of my chapter into wonder and the Anthropocene that I posted in 2023. This was and is, presumably, part of my book on the subject that—as all writers know, so often happens—I set aside in favor of finishing a different book. It’s still as dear a subject to me as ever, and please do read those past essays if you’re interested (and yes, stay tuned for the actual book coming…um…soon?).

I want to begin with Robert Macfarlane’s succinct summation of one of the chief issues we face in our efforts to address the climate catastrophe and the sixth extinction:

Inspired by the findings of Cambridge researchers who discovered that British children aged eight and over were significantly better able to identify Pokémon than organisms found in the natural world, Macfarlane set out to write a book that would reclaim “the magic of naming nature” through “summoning spells”: short, rhythmic poems.

That book, beautifully illustrated by Jackie Morris, is called The Lost Words, and it celebrates the identification and cherishing that naming the natural world allows. He provides a lexicon of slowly vanishing words—acorn, adder, bluebell, and so on—relying on a visual acrostic, whereby each stanza is capitalized to highlight the letters spelling out the thing described. Here is “Bramble”:

Bramble 

Bramble is on the march again,

Rolling and arching along the hedges,
     in to parks on city edges.

All streets are suddenly thick with briar:
     cars snarled fast, business over. 

Moths have come in their millions,
     drawn to the thorns. The air flutters. 

Bramble has reached each house now, 
     looped it in wire. People lock doors,
     close shutters.

Little shoots steal through keyholes,
     to leave – in quiet halls,

Empty stairwells—bowls of bright
     blackberries where the light falls. 

The poem relies on what Francis Spufford in The Child That Books Built called the “gloriously embedded” elements of language to which children are so attuned, “its texture, its timbre, its grain, its music.” Bramble is personified as “on the march again” across rural and urban landscapes, while the tightly woven pattern of full rhymes, “hedges / edges,” “flutters / shutters,” and slant rhymes “briar / over,” capture bramble’s invasiveness.

Where things might turn sinister in the fifth stanza, “People lock doors, / close shutters,” Macfarlane redirects the story to acclaim the power and literal fruitfulness of bramble: “Little shoots steal through keyholes / to leave.../ bowls of bright / blackberries where the light falls.” The almost incantatory stresses make the poem ask to be spoken aloud.

In short: the poem enacts the wonder of the thing it describes.

And this, friends, is when poetry becomes a true form of magic. It brings to vivid life the emotional and psychic resonances—it allows the reader to experience wonder through the vehicle of the page.

If we believe the Cambridge researchers—and we have no reason not to—then it is fair to presume that most British children have no idea that blackberries grow on brambles. They can name the fruit but cannot conjure an image of its source.

But through this lyrical and imaginative tableau, Macfarlane dramatizes the story of bramble: how it grows and spreads, how it delivers its bright fruit. The poem promises that children raised in urban areas, whose experience of fruit is reserved to grocery store aisles, won’t soon forget the power of bramble and nature to overrule the human hand, “All streets are suddenly thick with briar: / cars snarled fast, business over.” The creeping bramble gains almost militaristically on the surrounding landscape only to, in the poem’s final breath, offer a blessing of blackberries.

I cannot help insisting: this effort, this vision, these poems matter.

The final image speaks to the wondrous gentleness of the bramble’s contribution: it labors to produce a fruit that humans enjoy. The impact of this revelation extends past the final image of light falling on the glossy fruit. We cannot, should not, take this preciousness for granted.

If we have any hope of preserving the flora and fauna of this planet, elements which often cannot defend of preserve themselves, we must first recognize the spectacular diversity and wondrousness of each part of the natural world. Poignantly, the Cambridge researchers responsible for the study wrote of a need “to re-establish children’s links with nature if we are to win over the hearts and minds of the next generation,” for “we love what we know…What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never seen a wren?”

Friends, there is a noticeable disconnect between the pervasive sense of loss most modern people feel and a sense of what, precisely, is being lost. The language that once served to name our surroundings and secure our connections to them feels distant and out of use. In reflecting on the poem’s role in the Romantic era, another moment of unprecedented environmental destruction as a result of mass industrialization, Matthew Scott writes: “in an industrialized world of broken communities, the poem provides a refreshing reminder of the need to look with renewed care and compassion at the living entities around us.”

Let’s believe and advocate for that renewed care through poetry. That’s what we do in this community, and I hope we can center that intention even more deliberately.

xM

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