Four Poems About the Natural World

These poems were written in the 1970’s, inspired especially by the English poet Kathleen Raine, a Cambridge M.A. in botany and zoology with a strong focus on the natural world. Soon I was asked by my friend Professor Dennis Hurrell to speak to a class on Women’s Literature entitled “Form and Function in Literature” and to provide a contrast by focusing on “Form and Function in the Biosphere.” In doing so, I read and described the significance of a set of poems that had an ecological context, and slipped in a couple of my own.