by Ann Marie Thornburg
Keith Taylor’s new collection of poetry, MARGINALIA FOR A NATURAL HISTORY, will be released early this November. It is a book that is keenly aware, at every subtle turn, of the mysterious non-human consciousnesses that inhabit “our” human world. Such sensitivity is not new to Taylor’s work, but it is magnified by this volume’s economy and ingenuity of form: each poem is a compact and resonant eight lines, with nine syllables per line. These formal “constraints” distill each poem to its perceptual center by telescoping in on some elusive glint of the natural world that must necessarily remain remote. When I reached the end of this collection I felt grateful for the wisdom and respect—both for his readers and his subjects—so evident throughout.
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by Ann Marie Thornburg
Barbara Smuts, a noted animal behaviorist, writes in her response to protagonist Elizabeth Costello’s lecture in J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals: “When a human being relates to an individual nonhuman being as an anonymous object, rather than a being with its own subjectivity, it is the human, and not the other animal, who relinquishes personhood.” Thus, she writes, “personhood connotes a way of being in relation to others.” As humans continue to master the environment, it becomes ever more essential that our representations of the non-human creatures with whom we share it reflect their diversity and individuality. In other words, I propose that we reflect upon animals with the same care and nuance that we so often reserve exclusively for ourselves.
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by Ann Marie Thornburg
A friend and I recently discovered that bears obsess us both. I wonder: what is the root of this obsession? Awe? Fear? Attraction to the mystery of bears’ lives? Remarkable individual bears? Vaguely articulated thoughts about the nature of wildness? Voyeurism? Admiration of their awesome power and omnivorous eating habits? Probably all of these things, enabled by our comfortably domestic distance from the teeth and claws of real bears. We talk about what would happen if we ran into a bear on a hike or, perhaps more interesting, what would happen if a bear ran into us. The proximity of this imagined encounter is thrilling in the abstract, but if I think about it a little too long or a little too hard, the static of my thoughts buzz louder and louder, and then, suddenly, my brain falls silent. I swim momentarily in that darkish pool somewhere between dream and nightmare, imagining being paralyzed by awe and then fear. I would probably forget everything I have learned—and rehearsed over and over—about what to do when you encounter a bear. I would probably drop my can of bear spray and start to run.
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