Art & Nature

These poems contain neither ‘art’ (fine painting, opera, colored glass) nor ‘nature’ (organic material subject to decomposition lacking proximity to civic infrastructure) without the qualifying filter of the experiential: memory and language. Drawn from writing spread over several years, Art & Nature investigates the artificiality of generative processes while striving to replicate a natural speech, what Marianne Moore called “plain American which cats and dogs can read.” Known for poems on the war against Iraq and the rollback of liberal or progressive achievements in the U.S. — Bouchard has, since The Filaments (2006), made a conscious effort to move away from immediate political themes. These political concerns do not disappear but are subsumed in the poems and removed from the foreground of Bouchard's new work.