Sunday in The Baltimore Sun, Towson University professor Diane Scharper reviews "Black Nature" and "The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets," collections that include contributions from Marylanders. Her reviews:

"Black Nature," Camille Dungy, editor, University of Georgia Press, $17.96. Dungy believes that white and black poets look differently at nature, with whites primarily noticing its beauty and blacks seeing its harshness. The view, Dungy says, is intensified by the black experience of slavery. An edgy mix of pastoral and political, her anthology, “Black Nature,” testifies to her point although a few poems seem somewhat heavy. Dungy includes several poets with local ties — among them, Lucille Clifton, Afaa Michael Weaver, E. Ethelbert Miller and Kwame Alexander. Their poems view nature as blessing and curse. They, for example, look at trees and think of slavery. They see spring’s grandeur and remember the horror of lynching. Clifton (former Maryland poet laureate) and Baltimore native Afaa Michael Weaver (Pulitzer Prize nominee) excel at writing this type of two-edged poem. Both fuse contrasting emotions until the energy almost explodes on the page. Weaver’s “The Appaloosa” and Clifton’s “Mulberry Fields” are worth the price of the book. Dungy (an associate professor at San Francisco State University) arranges 400 years of nature poems by black writers, so they proceed loosely from distant to close up. Reading the book, one has a sense of progression from nature as a separate entity to nature as a part of the interior self. With free verse and traditional forms, the book ranges from the poetically written essays that introduce each section, to rich spirituals, to quiet Zenlike haiku. Alice Walker’s essay, “The Flowers,” is a powerful evocation of the end of summer and, like many poems here, has a spiritual resonance, which Dungy calls a "connectivity with worlds beyond the human." No matter how one names that quality, it gives the best of these poems staying power.