Review; Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry by Camille T. Dungy

A while ago I read the poetry anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry edited by Camille T. Dungy and today I'll post my review.

Description from Goodreads
Black Nature is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated.Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry—anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild.

Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. This collection features major writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson as well as newer talents such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements.

Black Nature brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole.

A Friends Fund Publication.

My Thoughts on the Book
This was a fun and interesting poetry anthology to read, especially due to the variety of the poetry which was included. There's something for everyone in this anthology. There were of course some poems I enjoyed more than others, but that said, we can't enjoy all the poems written out there. Some poems speaks to us more than others.

Black Nature is well worth the read though.

Comments

  1. thestoryteller4 March 2022 at 21:40

    I checked this out on Amazon and discovered that there was a vast number of poems contained in this book. The first one, 'The Earth is a Living Thing' was beautiful. No Kindle edition though.

    ReplyDelete

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