Lost Wilds

Lost Wilds: Elegies for the More-Than-Human World is a formally inventive collection of poems on the living world in an age of extinction and upheaval. Martin Elster writes of skunk cabbage and bristlecone pine, sharks and owls, bats, frogs, ants, turtles, whales, coral reefs, and lost or threatened species with a musician's ear for rhythm and rhyme. These poems move from close observation to ecological grief, from humor and wonder to lament, asking what human progress costs the creatures, habitats, and wild presences with whom the earth is shared. Though elegiac in spirit, the collection is alive with curiosity, wit, scientific imagination, and affection for the more-than-human world. In sonnets, villanelles, nonce forms, and other formal structures, Elster gives voice to beings often overlooked and invites readers to notice what still flourishes, what is vanishing, and what might yet be saved.