by Edited by Todd Davis, Noah Davis, and Carolyn G. Mahan
University of Georgia Press, 2024
How does a poet write an ode to a viceroy if their reader doesn’t know what a viceroy is? How do they write an elegy for ash trees without explaining why they require an elegy in the first place? With A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, editors Todd Davis, Noah Davis, and Carolyn G. Mahan propose a solution to these problems. Their hybrid anthology pairs field guide entries and original contemporary poems about the same species native to the region between Ohio and Maine. With scientific material serving to educate the reader, the accompanying poems and illustrations can provide imagination and insight.
The Davises (a father-son pair and regular contributors to this magazine) and Mahan have selected 70 species and arranged them in eight sections: trees and shrubs, wildflowers, mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, fish, invertebrates, and fungi. Few people read anthologies cover to cover, just as few people read field guides cover to cover, and I doubt many people will use this black-and-white hardcover as a traditional field guide. In fact, A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia might even be somewhat of an antifield guide and much more artistic than diagnostic in its intentions. The illustrations exemplify this point; some, such as that of the belted kingfisher, are impeccably accurate, but for the most part they lean toward creative interpretation – often to delightful effect. A personal non-realist favorite, Gary Hawkins’s minimalist porcupine, stares out at us like a sad, ungroomed lap dog from a mess of long, expressive, gestural strokes.
It is of course the subjective, individual, and personal that poetry and visual art allow for and that science ostensibly discourages. These pages overflow with poets’ childhood memories, dreams, and anecdotes about wildlife encounters. We also see members of these nonhuman species as individual specimens, as characters in and of themselves. We see Michael Garrigan’s single, specific red-backed salamander “nestling in the soft cavity of a decaying ash” as it “reads the Emerald borer[’]s death script” and Jordan Temchack’s northern dusky salamander looking up at a man lifting off its stone home. The self-conscious poets in this volume use caution in committing the pathetic fallacy (“Do I wish to smile, / deep in my skinkish self?” asks Jeff Gundy’s skink. “Do I wish at all?”). Rather, any anthropomorphizing serves to present models for a visceral environmental action. “We dig into this mud, releasing / what doesn’t sustain us,” say Anni Liu’s eastern elliptio mussels. “The result is a clarity.” In Talley V. Kayser’s “Suppose Your Mother Is a Beaver”: “even if / you never think ‘replenish’ or ‘aquifer,’ never configure / your worth in fixed nitrogen, habitat, dollars / your body knows.” This kind of ecological intuition resonates with Jerry Wemple’s stirring memory of a black bear turning into the woods and the “deep gargle of his voice as he moved away, surely certain of his world.”
The frequent humor – in Sarah Blake’s reference to the wood frog’s “permeable / af skin,” say, or in Marjorie Maddox’s prickly porcupine procreation – provides welcome counterweight to the move in contemporary eco-poetry toward elegy. To be sure, A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia holds proper space for climate change, invasive species, and other threats to the ecoregion it addresses. But the point here is of appreciation for what we have in the present most of all, of joy by way of deep attention. M.J. Iuppa’s closing lines in a tribute to the turkey tail fungus may offer the book’s most succinct directive: “look closely / before light departs.”