GALÁPAGOS

The creators of Serengeti: Plains of Grass (2022) profile another distinctive locale and its unique wildlife in poems and pictures.

In a prose introduction to the archipelago’s origins and ecosystem, Bulion refers to “challenges” caused by the arrival of humans and picks up the theme with closing observations, also in prose, about climate change. In between, she devotes verses in a range of forms and comments in smaller type to natural creatures and features, from quiet “La garúa,” the sea mist that “sifts across the islands’ highlands, / catching tip-top branches of giant daisy trees,” to lively “Galápagos Penguins”: “With upward chase, they make a pass / at picking from the twisting mass / of rich sardines or tasty mullets, / open bills, then (gulp) down gullets!” Along with giant tortoises and tiny phytoplankton, both marine and land iguanas pose fetchingly in Stadtlander’s rocky, unspoiled settings, while blue-footed, red-footed, and Nazca boobies turn out their webbed toes for examination, and six types of the finches that Darwin observed parade past, displaying their distinctively shaped beaks. Each animal is identified in the backmatter, and, in a set of analytical appended notes, so is the form of each poem. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An amiable excursion, literary as well as scientific.