“The trail is a circle / The cure is a forest.” With these incantatory words, Desi Di Nardo propels readers on a journey that sees nature anew – a journey that does not soar above the ground but turns inward, earthward, guided by a desire to internalize the ecological world. In this collection, the human condition is defined by our estrangement from nature. In response, Di Nardo puts forth a new set of metaphors that, to paraphrase Coleridge, conveys the possibility of symbiosis between the human and natural worlds. But Di Nardo is no flighty Romantic; she employs sense and emotion deliberately, resulting in a critical awareness of nature’s kaleidoscopic forms.

Di Nardo also diverges from her Romantic predecessors by suggesting that humans are always putting themselves at odds with nature. In “Yesterday and the Day Before,” she writes: “Let us forget the bear on the floor / That carpets the flesh of our soles.” The human world is marked by indecency, mediocrity, and even destruction. Bitterness runs through the collection. In “Secret Gardens,” for example, Di Nardo writes, “We load cameras as we step off / The streetcar to High Park Zoo” where we seek to get “Lost in contrived secret gardens.” The poems depict human beings as either deep ecologists (we get it) or deeply ignorant (we just don’t get it). Our most difficult task, Di Nardo posits, is aligning ourselves with the sublime infinity of the natural world from which we have become estranged. 

Di Nardo suggests there is still time for us to become attuned to nature, provided that, as she writes in “Contours of Light,” we “Contemplate a day in the country” and “Search for spaces / The contours of light / In the unnamed wilderness.” The Cure Is a Forest provides a refreshing vision of nature poetry. Its purpose is not only to reunite humanity and nature, but to do away with the kinds of self-involved poetries (and postmodern literary experiments) that ignore the larger landscapes of the natural world.