The Hopes of Snakes
City Wilds: Essays and Stories About Urban Nature
American Nature Writing, 2000
The Mountain Reader
American Nature Writing 1998
The River Reader
Grrr . . . Poems About Bears
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Grrr . . . Poems About Bears
(Arctos Press, 1999)
“Sun Bear”
Common Ground
“Wouldn’t it be great / to write nothing at all / except poems about bears?” Hayden Carruth asks, in his poem “Bears at Raspberry Time.” It’s also great, for a while at least, to read nothing else. CB Follett’s anthology GRRRRR: A Collection of Poems About Bears features over 200 ursine poems, enough, perhaps, to sate all but the most avid bear lovers.
Clearly, the book has certain expectations to fulfill. . . There are the necessary classics, including Delmore Schwartz’s “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me,” Galway Kinnell’s “The Bear,” and Gary Snyder’s “this poem is for bear.” Even many of the poems by less well-known poets, most of whom can hold their own against the heavyweights, satisfy in a familiar way.
Bears typically evoke mystery and terror, but they are also familiarly clumsy and poignant in their caged, dancing, and circus entertainment incarnations. Thus, one happily finds both the necessary renderings of “swagger,” and “bulk,” as in Lisa Anne Couturier’s untamed “Sun Bear.”
. . . Grrrrr: A Collection of Poems About Bears helps us locate creatures that frequent not only forest and tundra but also art and literature. Bears are as much a part of human culture as they are apart from it. Plumbing both their familiarity and their strangeness is perhaps one of the greatest things about reading these bear poems.
--Cara Chamberlain
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