Companion Grasses

Teare’s fourth collection considers what it means to inhabit and observe landscapes, both external and internal. Landscape begins as physical terrain, in particular, that of Northern California, with the poet walking and seeing. The observer and the natural world exert force on each other: “there where scale outpaces/ the eyelichen a line to horizon/ stem to tide a dilation /in which seeing is thinking/ to find a way a language/ to where the human fails.” Through his characteristic attention to sound, music, and form, Teare’s vocabulary becomes a landscape unto itself, language “a stem to aspire to.” As the poems begin to include more direct engagement with other thinkers and artists, an intellectual landscape populated by quotation and philosophical inheritance emerges, most notably in a set of agile, nontraditional sonnets, “Transcendental Grammar Crown.” The collection closes with two long elegies, still lyrical but introducing a more discursive side to Teare’s work. Here, the influences of ecology, philosophy, love, and loss most clearly coalesce. As he writes in the exquisite “To begin with desire,” an elegy for Teare’s father, “So much of our seeing/ lies in forgetting the laws// of the fathers, the ones/ we were given, & the ones// we choose, as though we look// always at landscape first/ through their eyes.” (Apr.)