THE EVERYBODY ENSEMBLE

A collection of pieces about the lessons nature can teach us when we listen.

Leach’s short, pithy, humor-laden essays continue in the vein of the Whiting Award–winning author’s first collection, Things That Are (2012). The opening, titular essay, set near the Zambezi River, announces an exuberant, Whitman-esque concert in which numerous animal songs are joyfully sung, and “everyone here is as contemporary as everyone else, and as temporary.” Setting up her own take on a medieval bestiary, the author writes that she “learned how to imitate pinecones” from pangolins and “how to be happy alone” from pandas. The French naturalist Francois Leguat, who observed animals on an isolated island in the Indian Ocean in 1691, has her ruminating, “If only mystery could go into exile instead of going extinct.” The author enjoys reading John Milton’s anti-censorship pamphlet, Areopagitica, because it “tells the church to butt out” in a time when, “before a book was published, it had to first be approved by a bunch of interfering friars.” In “Pedestrians,” Leach recommends overcoming wishful passivity and beginning the process of learning (anything) right away. Barnacle goslings, for example, must learn that they have to fly from the “four-hundred-foot precipice where they are nested. Their parents cannot carry them down.” When we call someone wild, we think “loud and crazy,” but most wild animals are “reticent” and “wallflowers.” Like many of us, Leach is concerned about the shrinking numbers of animals, and interesting flora and fauna, well-known and obscure—from Sicilian donkeys to elvers (baby eels) to sandhill cranes—travel throughout these pages. For Leach, it’s “yes to the Earth, my Earth, for I do not hope to find a better where.” Not every piece is a hit, but the misses are few, and many are good for sharing with children. The book is a good companion to Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders (2020).

Nice work from a wise, welcoming observer of the beauteous nature all around us.