Here, the blurring between self and other that you mention is further complicated by the ecology of “food & self.” The violence that we perpetrate against animals finds its “way in” to us, physically and metaphysically. And the poem too, as a retelling of such violence, is itself implicated. As Potts puts it in the prose-poem “Diary,” “The language of words is the language of consumption …” (62).

And whereas documentary poems such as “A Natural History” rely less explicitly on traditions of song than others in the collection, their steady, loosely syllabic lines and slant-rhymes (“ice”/“white”; “else”/”self”), as well as their use of dialogue, put me in mind of some of Frost’s most subtly disturbing poems, such as “Mending Wall.” (“The work of hunters is another thing: / I have come after them and made repair / Where they have left not one stone on a stone, / But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, / To please the yelping dogs.”[4]) Like Frost, Potts’s formidable control of the music of the line renders his poems’ complex, emotionally raw material all the more haunting. We are easily hooked on the poems’ music, and the more we think about the subject of a Potts poem, the more trenchant it becomes.

Jueds: Reading “A Natural History” again, I’m reminded of another Buddhist dictum: this time, the first of the Buddhist precepts, which forbids killing. As soon as one starts to unpack this precept, one runs up against a double bind, a phrase Potts often uses to describe his work. We must eat, obviously, in order to live — and in order to eat we must kill, directly or indirectly. If we don’t eat, we’re killing ourselves. How to live with this knowledge, that one of our most basic needs inevitably causes harm? Potts’s poems seem to me — not an answer to this question, because there is no answer — but a grappling with it, an attempt to engage, if not come to terms, with this most fundamental pain.

I want to continue the discussion of nonhuman animals you began above in your reading of “A Natural History.” Animals populate Trickster throughout, appearing in nearly every poem. I think you’re so right that the poems often concern themselves with the violence we inflict on the animal and natural realms. And yet this violence, too, is complicated from the start. It’s complicated, as you point out, by the implication of not only ourselves but of poetry and language as well. It’s further complicated by the shape-shifting nature of the animals who dwell inside Potts’s poems. Often, Potts chooses to capitalize the animals’ names, so that the Robins, Spiders, Pigs, Worms, and Orange Cat who appear in Trickster appear not only as themselves but as more-than-themselves: mythic or archetypal animals or animal energies.

These nonhuman animals interact with Trickster’s human speaker in myriad ways. As we’ve said, at times they are victims of human cruelty or thoughtlessness, victims the speaker tries to help — as in “Washroom (Oil Spill)” and “Tanka” — or himself harms, often simply, it seems, by virtue of being human — as in “Nest” and “The Good Life.” In the latter poem, being “sure of … allegiances,” nurturing certain plants and animals in the speaker’s garden, means that other living beings must be harmed or even killed (“I take a hacksaw to the Laurel, make visible / a path — this was our plan, after all, I must / prune the garden of uselessness, guilty …,” 6).

And sometimes, movingly, these nonhuman presences serve as intimate companions for the speaker, as guides and friends. In “Utopia Parkway,” the book’s final poem, “the old dog licks my hand / to keep walking,” encouraging and accompanying the speaker on his path (72). And in “Diary,” not only Cat but the other beings that fill the poem — Maple, Magnolia, Climbing Rose — move with the speaker in a wordless space of communion: “We are not one and the other; there is no addition or subtraction, only Life and the life within our life and the Lives that include us” (63).

I’m a bit concerned that quoting these gorgeous lines out of context makes them seem slighter than they are: a sort of easy wisdom. The truth is that within the poem itself, and the entire context of Trickster, which confronts so many of the heartbreaking and terrifying aspects of our relationship with the natural world, they are beautifully and rigorously earned. In these lines — and in such poems as “Utopia Parkway,” “Diary,” and “Familiar” — another facet of the shape-shifting Trickster is revealed: one in which, somehow, harmony and hope exist, in spite of the world’s brutality. Trickster, in its complexity, intelligence, and richness, is capacious enough to hold all its seeming contradictions, and to help us feel that this damaged world deserves our love — is worth, still, living in.