Flammable, Inflammable: Poems 1991-2006

The poems in this collection by teacher and naturalist Greg Darms "represent a rough chronology, as well as an approximate topography" of his life and work on the West Coast from British Columbia to California and back to Oregon. Material and occasions for the poems range widely, too: encounters with foxglove, heart cockles, dragonflies, grebes and spotted skink share a phenomenological space with sheriff's reports, photographs, texts and scores, flash floods, and his aging father. By turns meditative, epistomological, and elegiac, Darms' poems signal a kind of "return, a venture into the contiguous world."