- … and the tourists
in the curio shop
not knowing what to say
for
once in their lives, but feeling
the ground rolling
beneath them,
experience something most of them
won’t see in a lifetime,
up on the shelf the kachina
dolls,
those little gods of beneficence
who’ve
stood there so long
they’re mad about it,
at
last begin to flap their wings.
–
Peter Wild, “Havasu City,”
in Getting Over the
Color Green
The best anthologies are
more than greatest-hits collections. Among the familiar works by
familiar authors, they reserve lots of space for the unfamous and
unexpected. Though Getting Over the Color Green,
a new anthology of Southwestern environmental literature, takes its
title from a Wallace Stegner essay, it includes plenty of
surprises.
Instead of Edward Abbey, we hear
from a younger set of writers: Jimmy Santiago Baca, an outraged
poet from Albuquerque; journalist and art critic Rebecca Solnit,
author of Savage Dreams and several other
nonfiction books; and poet Ofelia Zepeda of the Tohono O’odham
Nation, a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona.
Household names such as Terry Tempest Williams are here, too, but
we get a new twist on their work. Williams, for example,
contributes a set of field notes from a birdwatching trip to Bosque
del Apache in central New Mexico.
Editor Scott
Slovic has defined the Southwest as “anywhere in the United States
(and perhaps Mexico) where the general hue of the land is more
brown than green, where one’s lips crack from dryness and sweat
dries almost instantly, and where cactus or tumbleweed or sagebrush
abound.” That might be a bit of a stretch for a Southwestern
anthology. As a desert reader, though, Getting Over the
Color Green is a fine and inclusive piece of work.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A sand-brown world.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
