Carrion

Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry undermines the misconception that African American poets are not engaged with or inspired by the natural world, do not find cultural as well as personal meaning in nature, are not witnesses against the destruction of natural environments, or do not champion expanding the boundaries of social justice to include access to clean air and water.

Black Nature provides proof of the engagement of African American poets through poems concerned with topics as far ranging as urbanization, pollution, the destruction of natural resources, the natural world in the context of African American cultural history, and nature as a medium for aesthetic enrichment. Anthony Walton’s “Carrion” reprinted in Black Nature spotlights the impact of urbanization and the destruction of natural habitats. “Carrion” begins with the image of a mutilated deer. The bodies of dead animals increase mile on mile. Highway numbers and subdivisions mark the roadkills with their abstract names. The losses pile up—wildlife, forests, farmland, and, paradoxically, connections between people. Highways and urbanscapes connect us, but Walton’s poem reveals our separation—urban centers disconnected from the natural world but linked by roads, the “clearcuts” of devastation. In Walton’s poem, roads, suburbs, and urban grids are trimmed with carrion. Nature is reduced to the “smashed meat and bone beyond recognition” at the on ramps of consumerism.

The land is, metaphorically at least, “denuded,” a stripped body suffering the violence of human attempts to connect, to eliminate distance, and to conquer time. But the poem’s speaker seems uninvolved. He or she only observes, records the damage, and passes by. A dead raccoon, the poem tells us, “lies blankly.” The raccoon’s body and its death are null sets. But the poem’s description of a destroyed porcupine and the “labyrinthine mess” of its intestines implies the myriad ways the natural world is maimed. Destruction is a labyrinth—a maze where we lose our way. But what of the labyrinth’s monster? Who would that be? The passersby? The comfortable suburbanites? The city dwellers? The real estate developers who name the newest suburb, Beaver Ridge, after an endangered animal? Or the poem’s readers. The poem doesn’t overtly blame anyone, doesn’t overtly make anyone its monster.

As Walton’s “Carrion” drives its readers forward it allows no more than a cursory connection to the landscape: highway numbers, the names of subdivisions, and brief views of dead animals. In the same way, Walton shows a modern imagination disconnected from the natural world. When looking at a carcass, the speaker can say only “it is something like a beaver.” Readers never learn what has been killed or who killed it. Nevertheless, Walton reveals that the way we name our suburbs and subdivisions shows a human craving for nature and natural spaces, a craving that goes un-sated and manifests itself in language, as in the names of suburban towns. The suburbs in “Carrion” are totemic: “Beaver Ridge,” “Fox Hills,” and “Deer Park.” Surrounded by devastation—by nature’s dead and maimed body—we memorialize through naming what we destroy through urbanization. Every road, subdivision, and urban corner is a grave, a tombstone bearing the names of what we’ve lost: Woodland Acres, Apple Valley, Forest Glen. In “Carrion,” fantasy natural spaces replace the real. Isn’t it, Walton shows, the cruelest irony that we name suburbs after the habitat that suburbs destroy? Do we memorialize what we destroy to deny the destruction or to ameliorate the loss? Or is it, as the poem also suggests, that language itself is yet another denuded space? The words we speak, live in, and navigate by are as artificially manicured as any other suburban space.

Only the sign for deer and not the deer itself, Walton suggests, can survive. Deer Park but not the deer. We no longer connect with nature and wild spaces through the body’s physical senses—but only through the simulacrum of language. Perhaps, then, a “nature poetry” is only another withered carcass, “something like a beaver,” roadkill, something like the personal-subjective response of romanticism. The romantic poem is always already...