Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden by Camille T. Dungy.
Simon and Schuster, 2023, $28.99 cloth.
Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History by Camille T. Dungy.
W.W. Norton, 2017, $25.95 cloth.
Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy.
University of Georgia Press, 2009, $34.95 paper.
MY SON, the one who gardens, introduced me to the poet Camille Dungy about five years ago. He gave me a copy of her poetry anthology Black Nature, “the first book to highlight Black America's long and varied legacy of environmentally engaged poetry.” What a great idea. Dungy hosted a party of black poets outside, where the natural light revealed new aspects of their work. Her theme in Black Nature, which she elaborates further in her new memoir, Soil, is that black people live in and appreciate the natural world. She grounds her story in the construction of a new pollinator garden at her home in Fort Collins, Colorado, but quickly expands to a broader discussion of the environment, including those who have worked the soil and hiked the hills, in bondage or free.
Dungy and her husband are older first-home owners, older
