Our Natural World Through Camille T. Dungy’s Poetry

Camille T. Dungy is an environmental poet who has several published books. Her work highlights different ecosystems and their correlation to her real life. She has a great use of metaphors that shape her poetry and relay the message she is putting into her work. An example would be the excerpt above taken from “Trophic Cascade.” Dungy uses her connection with the environment to take her audience on a journey of understanding how the natural world connects with everyday life and is like big life events. 

There are two predominant themes throughout the three poems I analyzed which are environmental activism and a connection of our personal lives and the natural world. In the poem “Characteristics of Life” Dungy is 

advocating for members of the invertebrate species. She is essentially fighting for their “voices” to be heard and is putting into perspective their life experiences to her audience.  While in “The Blue” and “Tropic Cascade” as I mentioned before Dungy is connecting her life to environmental occurrences like the wolves in Yosemite and the concepts in “The Blue” about security in our lives being fleeting.

In her work, Dungy expresses herself and her lived experiences. Many of her poems tie back to historic life-altering events endured by African Americans. In an interview Dungy said, “… a collection of decidedly American meditations on personal and political conflict, marking the transformations of individuals and ambitions as they record and predict changes in our personal, cultural, and natural environments. History, geography, identity, all these things and more played a role in how and why I wrote these poems.” (pg 1) She was taught early on to care for the planet we call our home and has learnt so much about different elements of the natural world and incorporated them into her poetry. The samples of the poems I analyzed were from 2011-2017, the world was changing during these times allowing Dungy to dig deeper and express all these emotions into her work.

Through my analysis I have discovered so much about environmental poetry as a whole. Dungy has allowed me to see further than just imagery and to understand the input of each natural occurrence and its deeper meanings in her poems. Environmental poetry is a beautiful form of art that draws the reader in and allows you to put the pieces together to see what message the poet is trying to convey through these connections to nature. This is a noteworthy form of art that I believe should be viewed more, as well as appreciated