'Black Nature': Poems of Promise and Survival

[Kind of Blue]

Camille Dungy calls this collection of nature poetry by African-Americans a first of its kind. She says black poets are rarely thought of as writing in a genre that can brings to mind the leisure, time to contemplate, say, a field of flowers.

Ms. CAMILLE T. DUNGY (Editor, "Black Nature: Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry"): The way that the tradition of nature poetry has taken off in America in particular is often about a pastoral landscape of there sort of idealized rural landscape, or a wilderness landscape in which people are involved. And black people have been typically working in the land, and that's not part of the idyllic version of things. And then also the majority of African-Americans have tended to live in urban landscapes, and so there's a very different view, quite often, of the natural world.

A haiku by Richard Wright.

Coming from the woods, a bull has a lilac sprig dangling from a horn.

Ms. DUNGY: Right, that the comic look of this giant, potentially really violent creature with this sort of dopey, glorious little lilac sprig and the beautiful smell of the lilac next to the probably not so beautiful smell of the bull, it's just so much contradiction right there. And the world that's being described throughout this book has that same breadth of possibility in terms of what direction we might go, from sadness to joy. And sometimes from line to line we move through that.

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