Church of the Robin's Ha-Ha!: John Burroughs' "Natural Religion" and Other Poems Paperback – Import, 7 September 2017

In “The Catskills In Winter” Anne Richey writes of wanting to be like Cezanne as she looks upon the horizon after (ironically) exiting a Lowes. While it might sound a bit overblown, I do think Richey is the Cezanne of nature poetry. Her nature poetry is not romantic or florid; it casts a cold and piercing eye on the natural world. I especially like the evocative lists she pens as for example in “Rock” she writes of the beginning of Burroughs’ faith as he sat on a rock gazing out: Church of the running brooks. / Church of the boiling sap. / Church of the robin’s Ha-Ha. . . . Or the list in “Lost Eden” which captures the building of the Ashokan Reservoir. It begins: Locomotives, steam shovels, / stone crushers, dump wagons, / boilers, traction engines, drills, / pumps, 2000 mules, their skilled / Black handlers. . . .

The writings of the naturalist John Burroughs fell into obscurity after his death in 1921. In his time he was as well known as his friends Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. In the 1970’s, people began re-assessing his work and its place in the environmental movement. Burroughs created a body of nature writing that was in step with the public mindset of the late 19th/early 20th century, when people began to yearn for a return to nature, away from the hubbub of industrializing cities – a yearning maybe even more pronounced today. Church of the Robin’s Ha-Ha, the book’s first poem, juxtaposes Burroughs’ earth-centered “natural religion” with the harsh heaven-centered Calvinist religion he was raised in. Anne Richey has caught Burroughs’ sunny realism about the natural world as it is – good and bad. This winter, if you can’t take a hike in the woods and the cold is getting you down, curl up with this book and its many evocations of spring, which Burroughs, listening to the robin’s “ha-ha,” called the happiest time of the year.