Bri Bruce: The Pulse of Nature and of Love

I’ve been reading Bri Bruce’s new book of poems, The Weight of Snow: New and Selected Poems. Instead of trying to encompass the full work I chose one specific poem that for me represents the center of her canon. Her central poem which manifests the elements in miniature of her complete oeuvre. That poem is Hailstorm (see below). Angus Fletcher in his superb A New Theory of For American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination describes a type of poetry that suddenly wraps the reader in a new environment, one deeply influenced by the Emersonian and Whitmanian tradition in creating “environment-poems” that “aspire to surround the reader, such that to read them is to have an experience much like suddenly recognizing that one actually has an environment, instead of perceiving the surround at all” (9).1 This notion of the poem surrounding one as environment and lifting one’s senses…