On Earth As It Is

From beginning to end, through great and small, the stirrings of a hurricane, the agility of a housefly, the majesty of a Pacific Northwest Sequoia, On Earth As It Is upholds the wonders of life on our lonely blue planet, bringing new inflections to the voice of eco-poetry, while formal and topical surprise from poem to poem defies genre. Steffen's restless curiosity ranges from silent alarm to staggering resignation, formal irony for the popular and political language of "global warming" to out and out observance for the iconic heroes and defenders of the earth and its elements from Rachel Carson to Ansel Adams. Still, barber, dentist, the memory of a dog, a Botticelli Madonna and Infant, Mae West, a tortoise wavering between its natural appearance and its resonance in fable, also appear as subjects in the poems to evoke the human and mythical entanglements at stake in the survival of our world. Shy of the overwhelming challenges we are facing in this realm today, the simple challenge of this selection to the reader is how to stop turning its pages.