Chapbook, 21pp.
What does it mean to be a nature poet? Is nature poetry a romantic discourse on all that is right and beautiful? Does the moniker signal a poet’s focus on place and description? In the 21st century it’s difficult for a poet to limit their writing to a secluded prairie or forest without the hum of a highway being at least a part of the experience. Nature now includes man and the man-made. Michael Trammell writes poetry on the verge of what some Floridians would call development; others would call it the metastasis of urban sprawl. His recent chapbook, Our Keen Blue House, winner of the Fourth Annual YellowJacket Press Chapbook Contest for Florida Poets, establishes him as a writer on the plight of space: space to live, raise children, and enjoy nature. Some of these poems are elegies for the portion lost to suburban planning; others reflect a mature understanding that the nature that surrounds us is also a part of us.
Collectively the poems offer a glimpse into the life of one family on land once owned by another, the Keens. We are introduced to the current family in the poem “Tornado of Birds,” as they observe the tenacious determinism of nature’s life cycle. Birds peck at one another while others continue their feast on the dead.
I looked over their heads
and saw
the birds–at that instant
there must have been hundreds–
flying their ferocity
against the fly-filled fur
of a dead
stray cat. A jay-bird
swooped overhead and hammered
three times at a thin shell
of ear. The web
of wings spun
a thick cylinder
from ground to treetops.
The image foreshadows the poems to come, in which we read of the encroachment of nature into our lives and the response of humans to nature. The poem begs the question: are we so different, so separated from the nature around us? The birds, picking apart what has unwittingly entered their land, signal a tumultuous, questioning era in the life of the poems’ speaker.
We all felt
the wind of it catch us,
pull us upward, sweep
at our heels, a constant
kicking, a pecking
at the gut and nerves,
a swirling vacuum,
a glimpse of what we
would not forget
of our three years
living a dare
to tangle lives
within the spinning
house of our tumults
and our joys.
The poems “The Barn” and “Pit” present an experience with nature lost and regained. The “ghosts / of horses” brushing against a car in “The Barn” could be from anywhere, any state. In these ghosts, who possess “the hollow / teeth of a hungry skull,” the speaker recognizes the symbol of a specific loss of nature. The poem hopes to revise a disconnect between humans and nature, as the speaker can “think / of nothing but to offer my wine.” “Pit” continues to suggest the meekness of humanity, offering an experience of nature rebounding as it rededicates itself to the family’s property.
But the land remembered, grabbing earth
we’d scorched with our all
night fire, breathing wild purple flowers,
a low cold blaze of dawn sky
rooted and growing in the ground.
Whether or not we are aware of it, Florida is a thriving landscape. It may appear to us as the invasive Australian pine and Brazilian peppertree, or as the more appreciated mammoth live oaks of the northern section of the state and skyward palms of South Beach. But Trammel reminds us that dangers lurk in the scenery as well. In his poem “The Club House,” he reflects on the thin line by which we live in Florida. The shack off in the woods, where kids once met as a club with rules endorsing beer and sex, encroaches on that line. After the speaker lets his son, who’s begged to play there, into the shack, he sees the “long, black, / twitch” of a snake. Without alerting his son to the danger, he lifts him out.
But what is the aim? It is the hope of the Florida poet to associate our lives with modesty to nature: a dwindling resource that a resident of any state must come to respect; a place outside of our condos and cars where we feel a connection to a more primal state, remembering love, family and nature. Trammell reminds us of this with the final lines of the closing poem, “Taking it Back”:
still standing amongst all
that’s warped and broken,
and you put both hands around it,
as if hugging all those days,
that other life, and then you
bend it softly at the root, pull it up,
and lug it back to your new home.
And that’s what Trammell does. He gathers the human experience in a book of compassion for the growth of what’s inside our homes and what’s outside. Our Keen Blue House is indeed a meaningful read for anyone in the city or countryside, Florida and beyond.
