Beautiful Holiday Gift Book: God, Seed Poetry & Art About the Natural World

God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World

REBECCA FOUST (ROSS) & LORNA STEVENS (SAN FRANCISCO)

God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World by Rebecca Foust, poet, and Lorna Stevens, artist. (Tebot Bach, Huntington Beach, CA: 2010), 43 poems, 30 four-color images, 104 pages, $20. Edited by Mifanwy Kaiser, with cover art, “Dandelion” and frontispiece art, “Seed,“ by Lorna Stevens; graphic design by Stevens and Jeremy Thornton; author and artist photographs by Thornton. ISBN: 978-1-893670-47-1. http://tebotbach.org. Recipient of the 2008 Eco Lit Contest (Knock Journal), 2008 International Prize (Atlanta Review), 2008 James Hearst Poetry Prize Finalist (North American Review).

It has become a rare event that a book is produced that combines art and poetry in such a luscious hold-able, read-able way. Give me this sort of lap-top prize over any battery-driven one any day. God, Seed, by Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens, runs on its own electricity.

God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World has already won several awards and received enthusiastic endorsements. What I will try to add is a response to the poetry specifically, with a grateful nod to the artist, Lorna Stevens, who provided the varied water-colors, pencil, charcoal-drawings and modified photographs--lovely delicate, yet solid depictions of animals, plants and scenes of nature.

Rebecca Foust is fast becoming one of the Bay Area’s best and best-known poets. The poems in God, Seed, revel in the fecundity and tenuousness of natural processes, acknowledging the poet’s and the human species’ dependence and interference in these processes. As implied by the book’s title, human interference can sometimes be an act in support of nature: “god, seed” is a reference to the Native American practice of planting a fishhead in seedbeds to serve as a natural fertilizer. Early English colonists remarked on this practice and adopted it for their own. The deceptively simple title poem has a ring of foreboding:

God    seed
sprout    shoot
root   stem

bloom
womb fruit
blight

hand of man
gourd and husk
famine    dust

From the start, the book signals nature’s bounty and blessing, but also mankind’s destructive stomp. Fortunately, the poems are neither screed nor rant, another endless litany of how human beings mess things up. The book takes the beauty path instead, and by doing so, it reminds us that if we lose touch with what we love and revere in nature, we probably won’t care about how we are damaging it until too late.

In “Lazarus,” the poet provides a different kind of list than the familiarly scolding rant. Here, she lists the names of animals. What a list it is!

Arakan forest turtle. Armoured frog. Banggai crow. Bavarian pine vole. Bahia tapaculo. Berlepsch’s parotia. Bermuda petrel. Blunt chaff flower. Brazilian arboeal mouse. Bruijin’s brush-turkey. Café marron. Cebu flowerpecker. Canterbury knobbed weevil . . .

As in the poem just before this one, “Taxonomy,” the poet reminds us “We take note of it/and make our lists. . . each numbered song.”

Foust speaks with such presence and a humble yet distinguished authority about all she observes, names and knows, that it is both relaxing and stimulating to read her work. When she does bring in the theme of human despoil, she has well-earned her Jeremiads:

My country, O my Ilium, home of the gods,
Golden-arched womb and first assembled UN,
O all-protecting glorious battlements
And Star Wars Defense Systems
Of Troy! Four times as it is moved, it halts
And we ignore gravity’s warning . . .
(from “Nuclear”)

If anything is missing from the pages of this book, it would be some short description of how the artist and poet work together, whether the poems inspired certain images or vice versa, or whether the process of putting the book together relied on intuitive juxta-positions. It is likely that the creators of God, Seed, fill audiences in about their experience of working together when they give readings; there are a few of these events scheduled around the Bay Area in coming months. I’d recommend that you buy God, Seed, a beautiful bargain at $20; proceeds from the book's royalties are being pledged to the new David Brower Center in Berkeley, a home for organizations working on environmental and social-justice issues.

DAY

Each day at dusk, a man
drove his old truck
to the barn to shoot

the magpies he’d trapped
in a cage there. Asked why,
he said because I can,

and when he used Malathion
in that green valley,
every last songbird died

in one light-dappled morning, in
one-tenth of a day.

(from God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World by Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens. Poem by Foust.)