The Place that Inhabits Us

Book excerpt: Poetry. California Studies. Foreword by Robert Hass. 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.