Hazard, Home Evokes Nature's Beauty and Vulnerability

In Hazard, Home, Christine Lowther offers 52 poems about the natural world and our relationship with it. Divided into five sections: “Waters,” “Sounds,” “Birds,” “Sučas—Land Holders (Trees),” and “People,” the collection conveys the beauty and vulnerability of the flora and fauna we share the planet with.

The poems demonstrate the author’s detailed observation skills as well as her love and respect for the natural world. Lowther uses alliteration, metaphor, and other poetic tools to good effect. In “Rain Water,” she describes water running in new maps of timbered tributaries / falling, flowing, flooding to the sea. “Perhaps Healed” notes the effect of fog:

This coast is baffled
—a cold hand held over the harbour’s mouth,
opal glaze muffling the setting sun.

In the same poem, Lowther writes The sun sets and night’s ink / blends slowly from treeline into sky.

Images of nature are conveyed clearly, enabling the reader to create a mental picture. In “Mergansers:”

Mother is a raft, ridden
by six soft ducklings
three more trailing close behind
under round brown helmets of down,
spotty as fawns.

Nature’s ability to invoke awe is depicted in “Swainson’s Thrush”: A plain-Jane bird opens its bill and enters their marrow, a beauty that blindsides them awake, as if wonder were a new word.

In “Identify,” Lowther encourages the reader to enter more deeply into nature:

Let’s invest in quieter devices
hear the otter family coming
the adults’ whistles and low pulsing chuckles
the young one’s chirp.

In the final two parts, the tone of some of the poems changes as Lowther explores humanity’s impact on the natural world. In “Hazard, Home,” and elsewhere in the collection, she comments on the way dead trees that are viewed as falling hazards by humans provide much-needed homes to many species. “Flash Mob: My Name is Not District Lot 114” gives a voice to the land and its inhabitants, providing a counter-argument against the human-centered view of the world. Diversity is suffocated by concrete, the poem argues, adding that there are consequences to ravishing the natural world: Choose your summers: blue sky or red? “Council Meeting: During the Break” adds the cautionary line: What we do to the environment, we do to ourselves.

The poems in the final two sections convey frustration, sadness, and the sense of loss in the face of some humans’ treatment of the planet as a resource to be plundered, rather than a complicated ecosystem to be appreciated and cooperatively shared. At the same time, poems like “To-Do List for Town Tree Protectors” offer suggestions about actions that can be taken to foster awareness or fight back against indifference.

Many of the poems in Hazard, Home, sometimes in earlier versions, were previously published in venues such as The Malahat Review, Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times, subTerrain, and Other Voices. Lowther served as editor for Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees. Readers who liked Worth More Standing, and anyone who enjoys nature in all its complexity and beauty, should find much to appreciate in Hazard, Home.

Christine Lowther resides in ƛaʔuukwiiʔatḥ (Tla-o-qui-aht) territory on the west coast. She is the editor of Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees and its youth companion volume. Author of three poetry collections, in 2014 she was presented with the inaugural Rainy Coast Award for Significant Accomplishment. Christine’s memoir, Born Out of This, was shortlisted for the 2015 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize. In 2016 Christine won first place in the creative non-fiction category of the Federation of British Columbia Writers Literary Writes contest. She served as Tofino’s Poet Laureate from 2020 to 2022.

Publisher: Caitlin Press (February 2024)
Language: English
Paperback 8″ x 6″ | 84 pages
ISBN: 978-1-7738-6124-1

Lisa Timpf

Website

Lisa Timpf is a retired HR and communications professional who lives in Simcoe, Ontario. Her writing has appeared in New Myths, Star*Line, The Future Fire, Triangulation: Habitats, and other venues. Lisa’s speculative haibun collection, In Days to Come, is available from Hiraeth Publishing. You can find out more about Lisa’s writing at http://lisatimpf.blogspot.com/.