Thinking Eye, The

By Jennifer Atkinson

Jennifer Atkinson’s The Thinking Eye, her fifth collection, looks at the syntax of our living, evolving world, paying close attention to the actual quartz and gnats, the goats and iced-over, onrushing rivers. The poems also look at the looking itself—how places and lives become “landscapes” and the ways the lenses of language, art, ecology, myth, and memory—enlarge and focus our seeing. If it’s true, as Gaston Bachelard says, that whether a poet looks through a telescope or a microscope, [she] sees the same thing, then what Atkinson sees is an earth filled with violence and beauty, human malice and ten thousand separate moments of joy. Clearly in love with the earth and the (English) language—all those inter-dependent lives and forms—Atkinson pays attention to both with a Bishoppy eye, a Hopkinsy ear, and an ecopoet’s conscience. Behind the book’s sharp images and lush music creaks Chernobyl’s rusty Ferris wheel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parlor Press, LLC
• Release date: Jan 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781602357907

Jennifer Atkinson

Jennifer Atkinson is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Washington, Bothell, and author of Gardenland: Nature, Fantasy, and Everyday Practice. Sarah Jaquette Ray is Professor of Environmental Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt and author of A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet.

Book preview

At the Chernobyl Power Plant Eco-Reserve

If ravens perch on the ferris wheel

outside of town, if owls

nest in the silos and swallows circle

the tipped watchtower, if catfish

bloat in the cooling pool and elk

graze on perennial beard grass,

if boars rake their tusks

among the roots, if black

storks claim the cloud-blighted

pines of Red Forest, if wire

succumbs to rust, if lichen,

if shingles unhinge in the snow,

if untrafficked lots cede land

to yarrow, if mirrors, if spoons

reflect the sky, if watches tick

in unopened drawers, if swollen,

if stiff-maned Przewalsi horses

foal, if wolves, if then, if then, if

ONE

Landscape of One Hundred Words

Of stone, fern, blood, and water I mumble,

trying out phrases, sounds

as distinct as the teasel’s shadow,

gestures of mind and music,

as gnawed at and off-plumb

as a mushroom’s gilled undercap,

as easily smoothed away

as a water strider’s V-ed wake,

useless as a junco’s dissevered

wing, less aware than a sleeping owl,

twice as invasive as loosestrife,

half as responsive as touch-me-not.

Quartz is far more consoling and true.

Words are not the silver sage

of olive leaves, the untethered milkweed

drift of down, but paltry things,

leaf-litter through which push up

foamflowers, black snakes, shrews and turbans.

The Laws of Succession

Asters to ashes, dogwood to liriodendron: wild has its way.

The afterlife is the understory—maple samaras in a red whirl,

a downdraft over a deadfall;  out of cold dormancy too early,

it seems to me, but what do I know?

Turkeys, a nodding flock of twelve at least,

a quorum, a jury, trample the duff of twenty years

ago when highbush blue- and lowbush huckleberry

held this ridge with birch and bobwhite quail,

and one little pin oak with its shadow of ground pine.

Now a copse of young silver beeches, their last year’s

leaves chattered cold in the wind, has shaded out the bushes,

overbrowsed anyhow by too many white-tailed deer,

barely skittish, willing just yards from the house

to graze the back lawn, itself returned, reversing

the laws of succession to bitten down grasses, to