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In Praise of Fertile Land,
An anthology of poetry, parable, and story
Edited by Claudia Mauro
Whit Press, whitpress@aol.com
2003, 175 pages, ISBN 9-9720205-1-9
Reviewed by Jeannine Hall Gailey
Even if buying this anthology wasn’t for a good cause (proceeds go to programs and organizations that preserve farmland) I could still recommend this book confidently to anyone, even non-literary readers, who loves food, rural landscapes, or both. The collection is made up mostly of poems by well-known writers from Virgil to Emily Dickinson to Pablo Neruda, interspersed with poems by children from a Seattle school. This was an unusual anthology in that I enjoyed reading it from cover to cover; the editor, Claudia Mauro, did an excellent job of picking accessible and entertaining pieces from writers both famous and unknown. Northwestern readers will recognize our local legends - William Stafford, Denise Levertov, Theodore Roethke - but the anthology is inclusive rather than limited by locale, celebrating writers from many cultures and time periods.
This book is divided into four thematic sections, “People of the Earth,” “Work That is Real,” “At the Table,” and “For the Love of the Earth.” The first and second sections focus on farmers and farming, the third section focused on eating, and the last on preserving the environment. It was very hard to pick favorites from this collection, but I'll do my best to discuss the high points from each section.
The first section, “People of the Earth,” includes such old favorites as Dylan Thomas' "Fern Hill" and Langston Hughes' poem, "Dream Dust," as well as several interesting short prose pieces. My favorite was Naomi Shihab Nye's "My Father and the Fig Tree." The following stanza illustrates the passion of the speaker's father for the favorite fruit of his own land, from which he is separated:
At age six I ate a dried fig and
shrugged.
"That's not what I'm talking about!" he said,
"I'm talking about a fig straight from the earth--
gift of Allah!--on a branch so heavy
it touches the ground.
I'm talking about picking the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig
in the world and putting it in my mouth."
(Here he'd stop and close his eyes.)
Reading the second section, “Work That is Real,” I paused several times to re-read pieces just for fun - two whimsical poems about worms by third graders, Marge Piercy's "Kneeling Here, I Feel Good," and Wendell Barry's captivating and energetic "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front."
My favorite, and the most sensual section, was the third section, "At the Table," which focused on the pleasures of eating. It would be hard to pick a favorite piece from this section, but Frederico Garcia Lorca's poem, "August," which I quote here in its entirety, would be one of my top picks:
The opposing
of peach and sugar
and the sun inside the afternoon
like the stone in the fruit.
The ear of corn keeps
its laughter intact, yellow and firm.
August.
The little boys eat
brown bread and delicious moon.
This poem is preceded by Li-Young Lee's wonderful poem, "From Blossoms," also about eating peaches and also a delight.
The final section finishes with a cluster of poems by grade-school children, framed by poems that praise not just land or food but the earth itself. Of these, e. e. cumming's "(O sweet spontaneous)" captures the exuberant hymn-like spirit of the collection itself.
In a world where the average person is less and less connected to the earth and the food they eat, where we are more likely to eat peaches from a can than pick them from a tree, this book is a reminder that each fig or loaf of bread is a small gift from the ground, to be savored and celebrated. The same thing could be said of the pieces chosen for this anthology. They make you want to follow the advice from Voltaire's Candide: "Cultivate your own garden." And go eat a peach.
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is a Seattle-area writer who has a Master's Degree in English from the University of Cincinnati. She has published in the Seattle Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, the Melic Review, Northwest Palate Magazine, and others, with two poems upcoming in a future issue of Rattle. Visit her site at www.webbish6.com or feel free to contact her at webbish6@hotmail.com