Cold Pastoral

“We continue to poison the planet through our greed, indifference and, in some cases, our willful, self-serving ignorance. Rebecca Dunham’s searing poems consider the consequences, from Katrina to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill to Flint, Michigan’s toxic water, with a combination of elegiac lyricism and documentary pastiche.”

“Cold Pastoral is both elegy and polemic, a powerful work that finds the poet unsure of what to do or who to blame… . This is a book full of questions, implicating poet, reader, and corporation alike. It’s a book in which the poet can say, ‘Reading isn’t enough,’ but also ‘Who will document the crisis that bleeds on and on?’”

“Dunham hones the docu-poetic in Cold Pastoral to throttling results, braiding uncompromising fragments of interviews, post-disaster testimonies, and excerpts from government documents, along with image-making and musicianship of the highest order—proving that artfully executed parataxis may be the environmentally conscious poet’s sharpest blade.”

“Rebecca Dunham constructs a narrative of living in a time of spectacular ruin, ecological disaster, and insidious chemical endangerment, with the poet/speaker both proximal to and removed from their effects… . She makes it clear that beyond her and others’ personal experiences, humans have become subject to a ruin of their own making.”

“One way to understand the power of this book is that it revises the pastoral tradition so as to make it meaningful in the time of Deepwater Horizon and Flint and other environmental disasters. Another way to understand it is as a meaningful and moving series of poems that explore how contemporary landscapes, with their human-made dystopias, stress and mangle relations between humans. And that it does all of this without giving up on the lyric, the form that was made to explore the intimacies between humans that we call love, is a sign of its timely power.”

“The environmental disasters of Cold Pastoral aren’t just the catastrophes that make the news. With panoramic detail, Rebecca Dunham’s poems unpack the ways in which small decisions can have enormous, unintended consequences. How, asks one poem, does one ‘continue in a world that disappears around me’? Dunham doesn’t offer any easy answers. Illuminating but not didactic, Cold Pastoral is an elegy for our endangered environment and the pastoral paradise of which we still dream.”

“In Cold Pastoral, Rebecca Dunham unfailingly captures and confronts our current ecological crisis. Her method is at once investigative, documentary, elegiac, and lyric. With passion and brilliance, she creates a rich and devastating poetry that does not resist confrontation, does not apologize for its anger, its intelligence, its prophecy, or its lamentation. With each new collection of poetry, Dunham has pushed beyond the amazing achievement and sheer originality of the last book. Few poets of her generation are writing with such authority, grace, and eloquence.”

“A poet of rich, singing diction and wild imagery, Dunham wields language as a way to conjure the reader into the position of witness… . Dunham’s language is detailed, textural, using metaphor to make tragedy not just haunting but also embodied—‘skull,’ ‘blooded’—and she refuses to shield the reader from grief.”