Bernard Ferguson is a recent NEA winner, an accomplished essayist, and among the most gifted graduate students I have encountered. I thought of Ferguson’s poems for this Kenyon Review issue because they are very naturally engaged with the natural world. Ferguson has already published magnificent prose on the environment. The Climate Sirens, a book of nonfiction about Hurricane Dorian, colonization, and the climate crisis is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2024. Themes of the book are manifest in the poems in both discreet and explicit ways. In fact, their poems expressed innate environmental concerns long before they showed up in my workshop.
How does a poet distinguish a “nature poem” from a given nature? The energy stoking such a question runs through the work. In “proper burial for the yellow-bellied sapsucker,” Ferguson writes, “me & the homies hover next to the river’s edge & laugh at the spectacular joke.” It is the “hovering,” not necessarily the river’s edge, that makes the scene enchanting. The landscape is not exotic, not foreign, not colonized in Ferguson’s poems. Their relationship to the natural world is as inherent to their self as their relationship to their body. They are the homeland; they are endangered. “proper burial for the yellow-bellied sapsucker” is a sly self-elegy, an extended mortality metaphor. Bernard Ferguson loves a good sentence. Their syntax can swing with echoes of Dereck Walcott — Walcott inside a more colorful intensity, Walcott inside fabulous flowing fabrics and dreadlocks. Ferguson’s Bahamian roots tie them to an Afro-Caribbean literary history so complicated they will have to write about it for us.
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