In Zoologies, a collection of essays on the relationship between humans and the natural world, poet Alison Hawthorne Deming (Rope) tackles questions about what separates humans from their feathered, four-legged and aquatic counterparts. Be they swans, hogs or whales, the answer appears to be very little.
Whether she's addressing endangered birds ("Owl Watching in the Experimental Forest") or ancient behemoths ("Murray Springs Mammoth"), Deming's essays poke and prod, unfurling a litany of questions that she doesn't always answer. In tales of extinction and endangerment, she charges her reader with taking part in the search for solutions, even when they're difficult--or nigh impossible--to envision.
In "The Pony, the Pig, and the Horse," she writes of the hardscrabble years in which she raised her daughter alone in rural Vermont. As she describes both the butchery of a family pig and her daughter's love for Traveler, a wily horse, Deming's awe and adoration for the beings that sustained them is evident. Like the best writers, she can balance two oppositional ideas simultaneously: the animal as food source and friend, inferior and equal.
In her essay "The Finback," about a dead, bloated whale that's washed ashore, Deming writes, "Perhaps something in me knows that if I can't stand the sight of what disgusts me, I haven't the strength to love anything in this difficult world." She challenges her readers to look harder, to take in realities both daunting and heartening, in the hope that humans can learn to value and protect biodiversity. Zoologies is more than a meditation--it's a call to arms. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer and bookseller at Flyleaf Books