RICHARD PEAKE’S INTERVIEW WITH BENJI COLE
Emeritus Professor
Richard H. Peake
An over seventy-year naturalist and birder, Peake has listed over half of the world’s 10,000+ species of birds, including the cousin of the Eskimo curlew, the little curlew, the star of Rare Bird Alert. He has spent a lifetime wishing to see an Eskimo curlew and has known people who saw the last authenticated record of one on Galveston Island in 1963. He now lives in Galveston and still hopes to see one. He has published several books of poetry and four other novels: Jaykyll’s Joust, an academic satire, Moon’s Black Gold, and Beauty’s No Biscuit, two novels dealing with murder and romance in the Appalachians during the coal boom of the 60’s and 70’s, and Love and Death on Safari, murder and romance set on an African birding tour.
Emeritus Professor at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, Peake has lived in the coalfields of Virginia for forty years. He participated in efforts to obtain legislation regulating surface mining in the 1960’s and 1970’s. He has published several volumes of poetry and an academic satire, Jack, Be Nimble. –This text refers to the paperback edition.
Earth and Stars
There is tremendous variety in form, theme, and tone in the poems in this volume. Many of the poems may strike the
reader as corroboration of Thoreau’s view of wildness and wilderness because Peake’s love of wild things forms his
poetic center, but this book also includes intense love poems as well as celebrations of birds and trees and lightning bugs. Though Peake celebrates nature, he does not view it with sentimentality. He faces without tears a world in which one creature preys upon another for survival, and he looks without fear to the “revelry of the grave” when his form becomes food for worms and feeds the laurel bushes growing over him.
