In The Civic-mindedness of Trees, award-winning poet Ken Howe updates the vocation of the "nature poet" for the 21st Century. These poems are witty and philosophical meditations on the haunting presence of the natural world, and on the familiar presence of humanity within it. In this book, odes to oak trees and ground squirrels renew the mysteries of plant and animal life; it is not an idealized Eden untouched by people, but a world, also, of highways that skirt the abyss and of "the great ruined jobsites of space", a world all the more strange for being real. At once playful and sublime, Ken Howe's linguistically daring investigations have updated "eco-poetry" for the information age.

Poems.