Poems that help us breathe together

In her charming introduction to this anthology, US poet laureate Ada Limón suggests that poems and trees “let us breathe together.” This comment calls to mind priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “God’s Grandeur,” which notes a rejuvenating spirit infusing the world—“nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things”—as well as Jesuit theologian and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s phrase “the breathing together of all things.” The anthology subtitle’s preposition “in” signals Limón’s intention to help readers get outdoors, where they might breathe with other creatures of earth.

Limón and the poets she gathers in these pages show that when people claim their places outdoors, they breathe with trees, birds, and other outdoor inhabitants. As trees in a forest stand in proximity, their branches reaching out into communities of peers, the poems of Limón’s anthology relate to one another in their attentiveness within nature.

The whisper of wind through leaves of a backyard tree might draw a listener’s attention, eliciting memories of that tree’s planting and of its neighborhood history, or inviting the listener to research the tree’s botanical ancestry. In You Are Here, poet Cecily Parks feels anticipatory grief for a beloved hackberry tree about to be cut down. She muses on the homely reputation of the hackberry as a species, and she remembers how, for years, that particular doomed hackberry spread its branches to make a shelter for her.