Description
Marginalia for a Natural History is a sequence of eight-line poems-written in an invented but rigid, almost unforgiving structure-that were inspired by the time their author spends talking with and learning from field biologists. Once he adopted the form, he was able to find a very real freedom within it that allowed him to write from science and observation of the natural world, but also from literature and even from small personal narratives and memories. He likes to imagine that each of these could have been written as a note in one of the field guides (or natural histories) he takes with him when he goes out into wilder places. Some of them actually started that way.
