Wildflower Stew

by Dennis Fritzinger
A review

I fell in love with this book when I read the first three poems. The first poem, Ambassador Frog, really sounds like a frog.

he’s got important business,
down there in the bog -
he’s practicing speeches,
ambassador frog.

The second one, Angry Red Squirrel, sounds just like a chattering squirrel: he’s red. he’s angry. he’s a squirrel.

And the meandering, searching way a beetle goes along is reflected in the short stop and start lines of Beetle:

he rode the conveyor
belt along,
tumbling, getting up,
tumbling again,

I knew I was hearing the voice of a poet who had taken the time to sit down and listen and watch.

The poetry is many-faceted - the sadness of Intelligence, about agents from the future looking back at us and Invasion from a Friendly Planet, about invasive species: when they win everything else loses. The beautiful poem, Of Course which begins:

as we moved
further into their kingdom
of course we encountered them;
raccoon, possum,
red-tailed hawk, turkey vulture;

and ends:

it was then we longed for
our own place in the world,
and turned
to go back home:
it was no longer there!

And then there are the very funny poems - Support Your Right:

If I knew how to do it
I’d arm all the bears
so there’d be bear militias
in the mountains somewheres.

And the funny, bouncy The Prawn Speaks:

I used to be a kid prawn
now I am a big prawn

There is This is Your Planet Talking which comes off as poignantly true and Rivets Popping about the global airlines going down which sounds terrifyingly true. The poet expresses the natural world not as some ethereal romantic Eden but as the place where we live, the place we encounter in the natural world right now, as it is.

The book has delightful cover art of the earth as national park and sketches at the beginning of each section by Joye Chizek. The poems are in alphabetical order and the book itself is nicely put together by publisher Poetry Vortex Publishing

On March 5, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it would not finalize a proposal to revise protected habitat for marbled murrelets in Oregon, Washington, and Northern California. The proposal would have slashed protected critical habitat by almost 95 percent. But the FWS reversed its previous plans and agreed with conservation groups that it would not be appropriate to revise critical habitat for this elusive little seabird.

Today’s decision means that approximately 3.9 million acres of federal old-growth forest remain protected as murrelet habitat.
“This reversal, coupled with a recent court decision throwing out a timber industry attempt to take the murrelet off the endangered species list, should end the timber industry’s profit-driven and illegal attack on the coastal forests that murrelets need to survive,” said Kristen Boyles, an attorney with Earthjustice.

Marbled murrelets are seabirds that use old-growth forests for nesting and rearing their young. In 1992, the Fish and Wildlife Service listed the marbled murrelet population in Washington, Oregon, and California as a threatened species due to logging of its old growth habitat. Despite undisputed scientific evidence that murrelets are disappearing from the Pacific coast, the timber industry has set its sights on the small seabird in order to increase logging of trees over 100 years old. For more information on this issue in Wildflower Stew click here and here .