Bookmonger: Poems of place and climate change

Published 9:00 am Wednesday, September 1, 2021

This week’s book

‘Between River & Street’ by Scott T. Starbuck

MoonPath Press — 114 pp — paperback, $16

In August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report that involved hundreds of scientists from 66 countries around the globe.

In unequivocal terms, the report stated that the changes we’ve observed in our climate over the last couple of decades are unprecedented in thousands, possibly even hundreds of thousands of years. According to the report, some changes are irreversible over the next several hundred years, such as continued sea level rise.

However, the report notes that dramatic and committed reductions in carbon dioxide emissions still could have a beneficial impact on stabilizing global temperatures.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has called this “a code red for humanity.”

Authors around the region have been taking this threat seriously for years, and have written about it in various genres.

Battle Ground, Washington, writer Scott T. Starbuck is one of those. For the better part of a decade, he has written his blog “Trees, Fish, and Dreams Climateblog,” which tackles many of the issues surrounding climate change in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. He has readers in more than 110 countries around the globe. Starbuck also has taught ecopoetry workshops at the university level.

Now he has a new book of poetry that addresses climate change and how it is adversely affecting the lives of all who are accustomed to living in this particularly lush and wonderful part of the world.

Published by MoonPath Press, the book is titled “Between River & Street.” Even the evocative black and white photograph on this slender volume’s cover of the Astoria Bridge soaring over abandoned pilings below hints at the potency of transitions and the gray areas in between.

Starbuck intersperses poems about bucolic Northwest settings like “Wild Strawberries,” “Lights in Doug Fir” and “A Spell of Birds and Fish” with darker observations about the constructs of modern civilization that encroach upon those places.

“Remembering Rocky Creek” is a three-part, four-page poem about how “… land and sky / migrations of men / replace the ancient ones of animals.” And how gray concrete pools that Starbuck calls “modern salmon ranches” now substitute for rushing creeks where salmon “once planted the secret life of the race / beneath autumn leaves and pebbles ….”

In another poem, “Salmonspeak,” he writes:

Maybe we never needed gray raceways /

and 5 gallon plastic buckets /

to propagate our race.

Or maybe we’re beyond the point for remedial efforts for any of us. Starbuck’s poem, “Tsunami,” is a wrenching realization that there is nowhere left to run.

Creeks and rivers flush through this poetry volume, as does the ocean tide. You may find yourself watering the pages with saltwater tears of your own. “Between River & Street” provides stark testament to our times.

The Bookmonger is Barbara Lloyd McMichael, who writes this weekly column focusing on the books, authors and publishers of the Pacific Northwest. Contact her at barbaralmcm@gmail.com