This week’s Throwback Thursday selection is Ed Roberson’s “All at Once,” from his 2010 collection To See the Earth Before the End of the World. Enjoy the poem, and a discussion of Roberson as a writer of “nature poetry”.

  

 

All At Once

Trees have whole streets
of when they were planted
plaqued with when the city is
to inherit them dead
of age almost all at once as if
a natural bombing.

 

People see a bill not figured in,
a blood red
collection come
like fall’s leaf   due without fail
an unseen cost of the design:
pale bud and yellow blossom—

 

though seeming little to do this time
with tense spring
in the window
of dead and dying trees’ terms up,
with expecting a life by life replacement—
not this plague of life’s time

 

as seasons across the city.
By trial we do, but don’t
know how death counts the rings
from trees to clocks,
species to singled soul
at its hour. or on history’s days we all die at once.

 

*  *  *  *  *

In the essay “The Earth Before the End of the World: Ed Roberson’s Radical Departure from Romantic Tradition,” John Yau explains that Roberson self identifies as “a Black poet who writes nature poems.” Yau continues, “Roberson didn’t say, though he certainly could have, that his view of nature breaks as well as critiques the historical conventions of nature poetry, which is the picturesque view that enables the poet to believe there is sanctuary outside of human reality. In contrast to much nature poetry written in this vein, particularly as the subject was initially formulated in English Romantic poetry, Roberson’s work does not view landscapes as sublime or transcendent, or as embodying proof of God’s existence. He has consciously broken with a radical literary and artistic tradition that includes William Wordsworth,William Blake, and Vincent van Gogh, but that is now both dated and diluted.” Read John Yau’s complete essay here.

If you are interested in reading more nature poetry from black authors, check out this book, from our friends at University of Georgia Press: Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry.

Ed Roberson is the author of numerous books of poetry. He is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Awards and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award. Having retired from Rutgers University, Roberson currently lives in Chicago where he has taught at Columbia College Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago.