An 11-kilometre stretch of land jutting into the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Washington's Olympic Peninsula is the source of inspiration for a book its author describes as part guidebook, part literary criticism.
In A Field Guide to "A Guide to Dungeness Spit", English Prof. Laurie Ricou gives readers not only a sense of the landscape that inspired David Wagoner's love poem, A Guide to Dungeness Spit, but a criticism of the poem itself.
"Dungeness Spit has a unique climate and ecology," Ricou says. "The birdlife, legends and folklore of the spit all contribute to the interdependence of landscape and culture as imagined in this poem."
Wagoner, a contemporary American poet whom Ricou describes as the Robert Frost of the Pacific Northwest, used the voice of a guide to structure his poem. It describes a trek to the end of the spit, an analogy for the life's journey of two lovers.
Ricou's book is a product of his admiration for Wagoner's poetry and his interest in different cultural responses to a shared environment. Research for the field guide took him from the hushed confines of Missouri's Washington University's Special Collections to the living-room-like Sequim-Dungeness Museum.
In the field guide Ricou alternates his commentary on the poem with descriptions of the wildlife, local legends and physical characteristics of the sand spit. The book encourages readers to move step-by-step through the landscape, absorbing the local knowledge and stopping to examine the elements of the poem.
Significant words and phrases in the poem are treated as individual points of interest in the field guide. Excerpts from a Sierra Club guide describe the cormorants, gulls and plovers mentioned.
Quotations from articles in the Seattle Times and from Capt. George Vancouver's A Voyage of Discovery, archival photographs, and a reproduction of Wagoner's first draft scribbled on the back of an exam envelope all give further context to the poet's work.