IN OUR NATURE

In Seaman’s debut anthology of 14 previously published stories by such literary lights as Margaret Atwood and E.L. Doctorow, Lorrie Moore and Barry Lopez, and with a foreword by Diane Ackerman, the theme of wildness gains a pleasing complexity. Atwood’s “My Life as a Bat” looks sympathetically at wildness in a former life, while Moore takes a more ironic view of the loss of a cat in “Four Calling Birds, Three French Hens.” More sobering considerations of the subject, in which affinity with nature gives rise to alienation, comes in Rick Bass’s “Swamp Boy,” as adolescent cruelty knows no bounds in pursuing a boy with a passion for the bayou, and in Lopez’s “The Open Lot,” in which a talented but misunderstood researcher at New York’s Museum of Natural History is compensated by a persistent view of wildlife in an empty lot of Manhattan. Finally, in Kent Meyers’s “The Heart of the Sky,” wildness proves providential to a family in trouble who are redeemed when a farmer stops his combine to save a trapped Canada goose.

A nicely mixed, strongly written collection.