Toucan Nest

by Peggy Shumaker

Overview

What happens when we enter unfamiliar realms, when we open ourselves to the unknown? Sometimes that not-knowing makes art possible. In Toucan Nest, the eighth book by Alaska State Writer Laureate Peggy Shumaker, her first vivid encounters with the rainforests of Costa Rica—with its basilisk lizards, bats, and bromeliads, its crocodiles, sloths, and strangler figs—refresh and renew our world in a work of startlingly beautiful mindfulness and imagination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597092630
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	03/01/2013
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Peggy Shumaker is Alaska State Writer Laureate. Her previous book of poems is Gnawed Bones. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally. Toucan Nest, her most recent collection, grew from an eco-arts writing workshop in Costa Rica. Professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop. She is founding editor of Boreal Books, publishers of fine art and literature from Alaska. She edits the Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press. Please visit her website at www.peggyshumaker.com.

Table of Contents

Long Flight, Shadowy Taxi, Garden 13

In the Shadow of the Guanacaste Tree 14

Ride into Town 16

Losing the Pink Bananas 18

Blue-Gray Tanager, here, Gone 20

El Laberinto 23

Pájaro Sagrado 24

Genesis, Quetzal 27

Slaty Flowerpiercer 30

Rain at Trogon Lodge 33

Ramón's Eyes 34

Mottled Owls, Parque José Martí 40

Sloth 42

Flamenco Macaws 44

Keeping Loud Ones Quiet 46

Calls of Birds we Cannot See 49

Toucan Nest 54

Lluvia 56

At Villa Lapas 57

Leaf Cutter Ants 58

How the Motmot Got that Tail 60

Venom 62

Basilisk Lizard 64

Canopy Walk 66

Getting Away 68

Painted Cart with No Oxen 70

Rising Before Sun 73

Slick Trail 74

Tent Revival 76

In Praise of What Does Not Belong to Us 78

Dantica/Tapir 80

Burnt Fields 82

Cloud Forest Trail 84

Strangler Fig 85

Lagoon Near La Selva 88

Ancestor 89

Howler Monkeys 90

Anhinga Drying her Wings 91

Mangrove Swamp 92

Tucked Deep among Tangled Roots 95

Mariposas 96

Blue Morpho 97

Murciélagos 98

Echoes 101

Spirit of the Bat 102

Gallo Pinto 104

Passion Flower 107

Editorial Reviews

Shumaker’s vivid Toucan Nest is about learning to see—Costa Rica serving as the textbook. Between the parentheses of arrival and departure, the pages burst with lessons—rich, beautiful, and sometimes terrifying. For us, looking over her shoulder, it is education by proxy. So iridescent is Shumaker’s language, we are there, floating downriver with the crocodiles, watching panicky iguanas hustling from a fire, the basilisk lizard ‘zipping / zigzag on hind legs,’ a flash of green and ruby eyes, and oh, did you hear it? the love cry of the jaguar and the cry of the quetzal whose morning song brings the whole blessèd world to life. A dazzle of a book.”
—Alice Friman

 “This is a book of burnished, lapidary attention. Its poems—vibrant with seeing, quickened with sound-work, subtled by insight—peel open landscapes both outer and inner. The costs of our human presence and extractions are in these pages, but also the radiant return of human awareness. Toucan Nest is a unique account of encounter, imaginative inquiry, and expansion.”
—Jane Hirshfield

From the Publisher