Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry

Camille T. Dungy's anthology of African American poetry is remarkable as a collection of poetry and as a contribution to ecocriticism. Black Nature contains one hundred and eighty poems by ninety-three authors, ranging from Phillis Wheatley to some of the youngest poets of our own era: Ross Gay, Sean Hill, Kamilah Aisha Moon, and Stephanie Pruitt. It is, as Dungy points out, “the first collection of American nature writing that focuses on poetry written by African Americans,” and it significantly challenges “the propagated belief that black people have little or no creatively intellectual connection to the natural world” (xxviii). Instead of using a chronological structure, Dungy organizes her book's poems into ten thematic cycles that reflect what she recognizes as the dominant trends in African American nature poetry. These cycles are entitled “Just Looking,” “Nature, Be with Us,” “Dirt on Our Hands,” “Pests, People Too,” “Forsaken of the Earth,” “Disasters, Natural and Other,” “Talk of the Animals,” “What the Land Remembers,” “Growing Out of This Land,” and “Comes Always Spring.” In organizing her anthology in these cycles, Dungy illustrates the primary point of the book, which she articulates in her outstanding introduction: some African American nature poetry is similar in its focus and style to conventional Euro-American nature poetry, but a significant amount of it relates to nature in fundamentally different ways. She shows, for instance, that a broad range of poets, such as Ed Roberson, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Helen Johnson, have written observational poems that are quite similar to those of the Euro-American tradition, while others, such as Audre Lorde, Jean Toomer, and Melvin B. Tolson, have written poems that acknowledge a unique relationship with the animal world, while yet others, such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Douglas Kearney, and Evie Shockley, have written about the ways that nature is freighted, for African Americans, with memories of fear and violence.