Back from the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century (review)

Expansive title notwithstanding, this volume focuses on Robert Bly, Gary Snyder, and Wendell Berry because “these three have been most consistently conscious of the poet’s role as a public figure in advocating for the earth.” Straightforward and clearly written, the book opens with a consideration of relations among “Contemporary Poetry, Nature Writing, and Nature,” followed by a more historical chapter, then one chapter on each poet. It concludes with “The Contemporary Poet as Environmentalist.”

The “separation between human and nonhuman nature,” though “illusory,” cannot simply be ignored, because it undergirds Western culture, argues Quetchenbach. The tension between scientific “objectivity” and a contrary sense of humanity as itself “natural” is characteristic, he asserts, and even constitutive of “nature writing as currently practiced in America,” with a new eco-awareness. All three of Quetchenbach’s poets consider nature—“the zone of interpenetration that is the biosphere in which we all live”—to be “the authenticating framework” that both grounds and validates their experience.

Quetchenbach accepts the oversimplified story that contemporary poetry turned from modernist impersonality to the personal, understood as necessarily private and “unsuited to making political statements.” Therefore, he investigates not just the poets’ relation to “nature” (the term not really problematized here) but also their “‘strategies’ for achiev[ing] a ‘public’ voice capable of addressing societal values and concerns.” Thus chapter 2, “From Jeffers to Roethke” (which considers only those two poets) presents Jeffers as modernist in his “public voice” and Roethke, “of the transitional middle generation,” as autobiographical in his “intimate imagery.”

Bly, now widely known for his work in the men’s movement and for the best-sellers Iron John and The Sibling Society, is an odd candidate for “nature poet,” Quetchenbach acknowledges. Bly’s editing of the Sierra Club anthology News of the Universe justifies his selection, but Quetchenbach is also critical: Bly is “[c]learly less of an outdoorsman than Synder and Berry”; his animal descriptions are more about Bly than about the animals; and “[t]here’s even a kind of dilettantism in Bly’s easy commandeering of landscapes with which he is basically unfamiliar.” Quetchenbach spends inordinate energy on the familiar “paradox” that the unconscious is transpersonal; thus, Bly’s “deep images” are “communal” and accessible. The prose poem especially is associated with “natural history” and acts of attention in which subject and object meet.

The Snyder chapter focuses on Snyder’s “spiritual ecology,” which integrates a scientifically informed “objective” standpoint with subjective experience of the wild. “More outward-directed than . . . most of his contemporaries,” Snyder adopts the shaman role for public authority.

Like Snyder, Berry urges poetry’s “use value,” seeing art as a way to preserve information or lore: “‘Local memory’ is . . . the link between the community and the land.” But Berry, in Quetchenbach’s reading, differs from the other two poets in his focus on the farm and domesticity, on “husbanding” in the largest sense, rather than on wilderness, and in his relatively orthodox Christianity. This “‘reinhabitation’ of Western traditions,” Quetchenbach believes, provides a “public voice,” despite Berry’s autobiographical materials.

The argument in Back from the Far Field, though flawed, is supported by good close readings, and Quetchenbach’s research is excellent.