The Place That Inhabits Us Review

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(More customer reviews)The Place That Inhabits Us sums up my life-long love affair with Northern California, ranging from Sierra frost, surf at Tomales Bay and along the Santa Cruz Mountains into the great valleys of Salinas--places that have been my home, heart and salvation are loving rendered by some of California's greatest poets. This collection also brings new places into tender focus while presenting a subtext of commentary on how we are shaped and informed by place.
This 160-page collection was first organized alphabetically. Then following the sparks, editors developed a line of conversation between the poems themselves, resulting in evocative themes with contrast between place, time and eras of poetry. Rexroth slides by Snyder and Soto. Hass finds himself bumping elbows with Walt Whitman.
Sixteen Rivers has done something masterful here, adding to the poetic conversation an invitation to consider our own impact on the force of place.


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The poems in this anthology embody what it's like to live in the astonishing weave of cities and towns, landscape and language, climate and history that make up the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Selected by the members of Sixteen Rivers Press, a regional poetry collective named after the web of rivers that flow into San Francisco Bay, the poems in The Place That Inhabits Us are drawn from both a physical and a metaphoric watershed. From the granite slopes of the Sierra to the Delta, through the Coastal Range to the bay and shores of the Pacific, one hundred poems by poets well known and not well known, living and dead, map this improbable region. There are egrets and grievous losses here; prayers, panhandlers, Delta mornings and sunsets in the 'hood; the fog, certainly, and the bridges, but there are shades of Dante on a Miwok trail, and Wang-wei haunts the slopes of Grizzly Peak. These poems are internal maps, the mental maps "that for humans," writes Robert Hass in the foreword, "make a place a place." Gathered together, they evoke the San Francisco Bay watershed, the place that inhabits us.

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