James Prosek

Mutton Snapper

From Ocean Fishes

Kathleen Dean Moore

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From Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

Unknown Artist

Snowy Owls

From Drawing Birds

Edvard Munch

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Landscape, Maridalen by Oslo

From Munch

Henri Matisse

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Pot of Geraniums

From Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: The Hermitage, Lenningrad, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Claude Monet

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Bazille and Camille

From Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: The Hermitage, Lenningrad, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Camille Pissarro

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The Artist's Garden at Eragny

From Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: The Hermitage, Lenningrad, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Homer Winslow

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From How Artists See Play

Karl Shapiro

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From The Poets Laureate Anthology

Wild Comfort by Kathleen Dean Moore

Perhaps the best essay in Wild Comfort is the piece that launches the collection, The Solace of Snakes.  It’s possible that it’s my favorite essay because of her cunning implementation of snake tins (sheets of metal) to give snakes a proper home in a cleared field.  Kathleen Dean Moore further explains her recordings each day as she carefully lifts the snake tins and examines the life beneath: “A large vole. . . dropping blind babies from her teats like ripe plums,” garter snakes, rubber boas, an alligator lizard – treasures of the dark that are suddenly revealed in the light of Moore’s simple prose.

While The Solace of Snakes is my favorite essay you might find that you prefer her essay on happiness, Moore’s scavenger hunt for joy’s many complexities, both surprising and apparent and how she fills a basket with her discoveries, a basket overflowing with hastily written revelations with unyielding permanence.

Or you will weep when Moore is told that a portion of her parent’s remains will end up in a landfill, but rejoice as Moore realizes that a fragment of their remains will be “taken up into the body of a bird, their calcium crusting against the open spaces in the bones that lifts its wings.”

You may be enthralled by Moore’s notion of using the word human as a verb, and you might attempt to define what it means to human, which could be a very remote path into the fragrant salt of the earth’s womb, or it could be a sudden fork that you take as you human your way through the decision.

Whichever essay it is that you decide to love most; it will be a tough but joyous voyage as you sift through Moore’s words. You may choose to love them all.  You may pluck a gem from each to ponder over just as a magpie jay runs “each of its extravagant tail feathers through its black beak, one and then another.”

Emily Flake

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From The New Yorker, Oct 3 2011

Edvard Munch

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Fertility II

From Munch

Vincent van Gogh

Undergrowth with Two Figures

From The Common, Issue No. 06