During The Rewilding Institute‘s virtual book launch on June 22, 2020, poet David Crews recited his poem “Ecotone” which was featured in the Rewilding Earth: Best of 2019 anthology and online at Rewilding Earth. One of several poetry readings featured during the event, Crews reminds us that poetry offers a timely, accessible portal between imagination and wilderness.
Watch his reading in this video below, and read the full poem online at rewilding.org.
Poet David Crews reads his poem “Ecotone,” which is published in Rewilding Earth: Best of 2019.
TRI Executive Director (and anthology co-editor) John Davis, reflected on Crews’ poem:
“Poet David Crews explores the intermingling of physical being in our bodies and the land, in his poem ‘Ecotone’.”
Intermingling. Communing. Emotional, even spiritual liberation. This is the ample quest of a poem that documents cathartic coupling, a dance at once physical and metaphysical, and an ecological plunge into the familiar unknown and the unknown familiar.
The forest receives exiles
solo natives
some call it the healing woods
too much longing
for a body to contain
I want to shatter every reflection I see
want my body to be free
of its weight, in water
I forgive you
you are loved— David Crews, “Ecotone”
This longing, this confidence, this candor, and this optimism are familiar to readers of Crews’ poetry. Familiar and profoundly, beautifully revitalizing.
Rewilding Earth: Best of 2019
The second annual Rewilding Earth anthology, published in partnership with Essex Editions, features essays, poems, and art by leading advocates for the natural world. This elegant volume inspires from first glance with a joyful rewilding vision gracing the cover by Essex, NY based author/illustrator Steven Kellogg. Within this user-friendly collection, you will discover chronicles of heroes restoring wild places and saving endangered species; features on people adopting positive, healing roles in the desperate work of abating the extinction and climate crises; common-sense suggestions for how to peacefully relax human numbers (in terms of population and consumption) to levels that allow a renewed flourishing of biological diversity; and the ingredients and recipes for preventing future pandemics.
Learn more and order the book here.
About David Crews
David Crews is author of Wander-Thrush: Lyric Essays of the Adirondacks (Ra Press, 2018) and High Peaks (Ra Press, 2015)—a poetry collection that catalogs his hiking of the “Adirondack 46ers” in northern New York. He holds an MFA from Drew University where he studied with poets Ross Gay, Aracelis Girmay, Ira Sadoff, and Judith Vollmer. Crews serves as artist-in-residence with ARTS By The People, where he edits poetry and lyrical prose for Platform Review and the Platform Chapbook Series, and contributes as writing coordinator for Moving Words—a project that makes possible international collaboration among artists of prose, poetry, voice acting, and animation. His poem “Ecotone” was featured in the ABTP project Intonation—a collaboration between American poets and composers from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. His website: davidcrewspoetry.com.
