Books like Weeds and Stars — picked by fans

“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes).”

I first heard these words from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman at a Berkeley Poets Cooperative workshop in 1972. I was intrigued and had to read Whitman’s work myself! Up until this point, my primary influences as a poet had been the Romantics (especially Keats, Shelley, and Byron), Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Whitman was a revelation. He showed me not only that a poet could write in an entirely different way, but also that an individual can encompass and represent vastness. When Whitman reveals his name in “Song of Myself,” he includes the whole universe in a single breath: “Walt Whitman, a kosmos.” 

Sylvia Plath created an important body of poetry although she committed suicide at age 30.

After hearing about her work in the 1970s, I looked for her books and read all of them before The Collected Poems came out in 1981. Her images were indeed amazing, and they made me look at the world more closely: “The pears fatten like little buddhas. / A blue mist is dragging the lake.”

Even more importantly, she wrote honestly about undesirable mental states like depression: “People or stars / Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.” I admired her willingness to share her sorrow, anger, and jealousy, turning negative moods into art, and I wanted to bring such candor into my own poetry.

An abundance of gorgeous images and philosophical insights!

Who else would write “The sparrow gleans and prims among the icy / weeds, hardly noticing, as if she knew / she were not merely herself, not pulse, / not marrow, not throbbing, but an eternal / equation of motion relative to belief”?

Pattiann Rogers always astounds me with her specific, concrete images and knowledge of science, as well as the philosophical insights that seem to spring organically from the poem itself.

I began following Rogers when her first book, The Expectations of Light, came out in 1982. I felt so close to her poems that I wished I’d written them myself, and I have been feasting on her books, including Song of the World Becoming, ever since.

In the title poem of Mega-Galaxies, Coleman compares galaxies weighing a billion times more than our sun to individual humans lined up side by side in their boxes in a Zoom meeting.

Think about that: we each contain the limitlessness of the universe! This reminds me of Walt Whitman, who called himself “a kosmos.” I first discovered Coleman’s poetry in 2019 when the anthology she edited, HERE: Poems for the Planet, was published, and I immediately recognized her as a kindred poet.

She is concerned with both understanding the universe and preserving the ecosystems of Earth—all the interrelated plants, animals, and microorganisms, both the humble and the magnificent.

Mega-Galaxies is a slender volume; I look forward to reading more of Coleman’s work.

While you will learn much about the nature and management of weeds from this book, you will also find yourself painlessly learning the basics of botany-- the parts of plants, how they live, how seeds evolved, how ecosystems evolve. While she keeps weeds at bay, Stein favors a garden, as do I, in which the desirable plants may self-sow a bit. It is a gardening philosophy that is current and can produce lovely, serendipitous gardens. 

One-stop shopping on the recent history of unwanted (by people) plants.

Though Mabey does not delve far into the past, his treatment of how colonialism in the past two centuries re-shaped the botanical landscape of the entire planet is comprehensive. He is particularly good on islands, where "invasive" plants arrived and thrived with shocking regularity as European and other ships created denser transcontinental connectivity.

He proves that modernity and its technologies did not fix the ongoing human incapacity to control vegetation, but if anything, left us with a bigger and more hybrid botanical mixture.

Marco Wilkinson writes about his mother who moved from Uruguay to the States, who he knows well, and his father, who he doesn’t. Wilkinson understands his childhood and complicated adulthood as a story intertwined with the plants he’s learned about. In Madder, the narrator details plants’ xylem and their weediness, their Latin names, and their unpredictable growing habits while peeling away the internal systems of his own plant-like self. Wilkinson pairs plant with human to show how growth, thirst, rootedness, and supportive nutrients make for resilient bodies.

Wilkinson takes such care, too, to pull back the weeds and to pull them apart—Thanks to his careful attention to every part of the plant, I can see through the plant as well as inside the workings of the plant. I am physically in the body even though I get that it’s a big metaphor for the mind.

Behind weeds, trees are perhaps the most common plant many kids will encounter in their day to day lives, and another way children can access nature near home and school. And while trees are complex living things at the apex of the plant kingdom, they often are unnoticed and underappreciated. This beautiful lyrical picture book gives children a context to explore what a tree can do through kid-sized comparisons to what children can also do. Use it to help children explore one of the most common features of both urban and rural landscapes: trees.

John Eveyln’s book is classic. He was the first person (in English anyway) to discuss exotic vegetables, even common weeds, in terms of healthy salads. The man was literary, very smart, and he knew how to cook. I have often used his recipes and surprising enough, he is as trendy today as he was in 1699. Furthermore, this book is a talisman for real foodies. My enthusiasm for Evelyn was shared by the late English author Jane Grigson, whose book is also on my list. 

I love stories based on actual events, such as this. A scraggly plant grows in the middle of a traffic circle, and though most people ignore it as they pass by, a little girl wraps it in tinsel. More people add to it and even leave gifts under the decorated weed. Soon the community notices not just the little weed, but each other. Readers can find specific examples of kindness, not only in the text but in Gortman’s lovely illustrations. One of my favorites is where an older woman helps a homeless man find a job. The healing power of kindness is demonstrated as people’s hearts awaken, and the town is healed of its apathy due to the kindness of others.