A poetic ecology of Colorado's mountains and Great Plains, exploring the plant, animal, and microbial lives that shape its character in a century harrowed by human disturbances and stark evolutionary rearrangements.
With a peculiar interest in vermin and so-called invasive species, the poems in Nathan Manley's Native explore Colorado ecology—organisms as grouped and understood in the taxonomies of memory, history, scientific practice, personal experience, and (to a frankly unanticipated extent) Christian cosmology. Each piece considers a different organism or assemblage of organisms. Ranging from the bunchgrass-stippled flats of the Eastern Plains to the hogbacks and streamlets of the Front Range to the lichened alpine parks of the Rockies, Native touches on the sheer panoply of plant, animal, and microbial life comprising the region's biotic community. The collection draws on more than two hundred years of scientific literature in its project of compiling a poetic ecology to meet the twenty-first century—an age in which mankind has irreparably fractured, shuffled, re-pieced, and transfigured the natural order to an extent that cannot but strike a sympathetic heart with both terror and awe, a reverence for the beauty of a wounded Nature and a vested hope in the holy contiguity of all things.
About the Author :
Nathan Manley is a poet, translator, and contracts attorney from Windsor, Colorado. He is the author of two chapbooks, Numina Loci and Ecology of the Afterlife. Recent poems and Latin translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Tahoma Literary Review, Spillway, Image, Portland Review, The Classical Outlook, and others. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. When he's not too consumed with government work or writing projects, he composes music as a multi-instrumentalist.
Review :
'For sheer musical intensity, local precision, and quirkiness of spirit, this book deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Alice Oswald's Dart or Lorine Niedecker's Lake Superior. Paeans to place indeed! But instead of the waterborne drifting of those poets, Nathan Manley gives us his dusty Western plains, where the foothills of the Rockies begin their rise—there is something charmed about his inhabiting of these places through the full range of their creaturely lives, everything from algae to pronghorns to cutworms to owls. Here it all is, in this beautiful book, while we barely have it still, a loving witness to what we would lose." — David Rivard
