Lisa Timpf Interviews Ian Thomas

(Raven Chapbooks, 2023)

Ian Thomas

In his poetry chapbook Green Islands: Poems from the Great Bear Rainforest, Ian Thomas explores the flora, fauna, and atmosphere of British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest with detailed, vivid poems containing striking imagery. In the book’s Afterword, Thomas states, “These poems were written over several years as I worked as a biologist, studying wildlife in the territory of the Haítzaqv (Heiltsuk) Nation.”

As someone who appreciates nature, I found Green Islands captivating and resonant. I’ve made my own attempts to capture my feelings about the natural world through poetry, and admired Ian’s skill at creating such strong images. Recently, Ian was kind enough to take the time for an interview to discuss his poetic journey, and provide some nature-poetry-writing tips as well.

This interview took place over Zoom, followed by clarifications and additions via email.

Lisa Timpf: In reading Green Islands, I get the sense that you have a deep affection, and respect, for nature, whether it’s plants or animals. Is that an accurate assessment? And if so, what led to your interest in the natural world?

Ian Thomas: Nature and wildlife have been lifelong obsessions for me. As far back as I can remember, wild creatures have had this inescapable force and power for me. That interest has been sustained through my life, steadily deepening and expanding as I learned and grew.

LT: When did you first start writing poetry about nature?

IT: I started writing poetry in my late teens and early twenties. When I first started doing it, it was hard to find a voice. From the very beginning, the immediacy, urgency, and power of my experiences with the natural world were something I wanted to express, but I lacked the capacity to do so effectively.
 
A lot of the nature poetry that I was exposed to was from Europe, but I really craved poems that spoke to these very particular creatures and landscapes that I knew and loved. I tried to write the kind of poetry I would have wanted to have for myself, to give myself pathways and windows into my own encounters with nature.

LT: The bio in Green Islands notes that you received a Master’s degree in Biological Sciences from University of Windsor. You’re educated as a biologist and have worked in that field, so your poems reflect both observation and knowledge. How do you see that interplay working in your writing?

IT:  My overarching interest is in the creatures themselves, and I’m excited by different ways of engaging with and understanding nature. I took my undergraduate degree in English Literature, and then transitioned to biology.

I don’t feel there is a large gap between scientific and poetic inquiry. Both are focused on a practice of careful attention; both, at their best, have a strong, rigorous fidelity to the identity of the subject sustained by a humility and receptivity to something beyond ourselves.

I think poetry itself has a special connection to the science of ecology, because to me, poetry is fundamentally ecological in its approach to language.  Ecology allows us to understand a creature in an ecosystem as having numerous identities through its relationships with other living beings. A wolf, for instance, is related through evolutionary lineage to foxes and coyotes, through its dietary needs to deer, through its identity as a predator to cougars and bears, to trees and shrubs by how wolf predation limits deer overgrazing, and through these plant communities a wolf is linked to songbirds and insects who depend on these trees and shrubs as habitat. The ecologist attempts to understand the wolf’s diverse interconnection with its world, identifying that each creature has many faces and plays many roles.

Poetry identifies that same ecological principle in words themselves. Rather than a legal or technical document that attempts to strip all auxiliary information from the word, the poem explores words in their ecological context, showing us how a word is related to other words through explicit meaning but also through how it sounds (rhyme and alliteration),  through its associated images, and through the author’s and readers' own internal web of meaning, memory and experience.

Poetry takes each word like a creature in a forest, not like a dissected specimen on a laboratory bench. I think then that poetry is uniquely equipped to engage with nature and speak to the richness and complexity of wild systems, embodying in itself the values of ecology as it describes them.

LT: I particularly enjoyed your poems relating to wolves, and again, it seems to me that your appreciation for them shines through in your poems. For example, in “Wolf Encounter,” you describe a wolf as “lovely like a whole hill of incense,” and walking on “spruce-tip feet.” Can you talk a bit about why wolves hold a special place for you?

IT:  They are one of those animals that loom so large in the human imagination. People love them, hate them, fear them, even without ever having seen one in person. Their enormous ecological role and complex social lives make them among the most fascinating of wild creatures. Wolves enchanted me for many years before I saw them in person.

The wolves of the Great Bear Rainforest (GBR) are a unique population unlike any other wolves on earth. They are considered “sea wolves” because much of their food—salmon, marine mammals, herring eggs—comes from the ocean. Due to the remoteness of this area and the values of respect and coexistence held by local First Nations people, these sea wolves have faced some of the lowest levels of human persecution of any wolves in the world. The wolves of the GBR have been called “the last wild wolves” because they live in relative safety from the distorting force of human persecution.

When I first went up to this part of the GBR in the territory of the Heiltsuk First Nation, even the possibility of meeting with these animals gave the trip almost the quality of a pilgrimage for me.
​
The presence that a wolf has is hard to describe. There is a sense of purpose, an autonomy, and an intensity that is spellbinding. Each encounter is unique and carries an incredible charge. Even when I am in their habitat, and I don’t see them, just knowing I am sharing a space with them gives me a sense of awe and privilege bordering on spiritual wonder.

LT: You use some striking metaphors or images in the poems. For example, in “Kunsoot,” you describe how “Spotted fins of pink salmon flickered on the surface / like drifting leaves or drowning butterflies.” I’m interested in your writing process. Do these sorts of images come to you at the time, or do you start writing a poem and then arrive at some of these images later, on reflection? Or is it a bit of both?

IT: Metaphors generally arrive at the very beginning of my poetic process; in fact, many of my poems start with a metaphor, which is to say they start with an intense apprehension of a relationship or connection between two things that may at first seem to be unrelated. A good metaphor shows us how the world is rich in connections, bringing us back to poetry as an exercise in building an ecology of the mind.
 
In this particular metaphor you mention, I am describing a very direct visual experience. When the pink salmon comes into spawning colours, its fins turn bright yellow and become covered in black polka dots. The bright yellow tails sticking out of the water when the salmon are gathered in dense aggregations in their spawning pools were strikingly reminiscent to me of butterflies or autumn leaves on the water's surface.

Other metaphors can be more complex. The end of the Kunsoot poem talks about mushrooms as “ghostly miners”. Instead of an immediate visual association, this metaphor links the mushroom with human resource extractors through a conception of the biology of the fungus. Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of much larger subterranean organisms that play a crucial role in extracting nutrients from the soil and distributing them throughout the ecosystem, similar to how human miners bring formerly inert minerals out of the earth to make them accessible to human economies.

This mining metaphor attempts to shed light on the mushroom’s relationship to the salmon, which at first seems like a disconnected observation. Through their subterranean mycorrhizae, the fungi are busy extracting the rich nutrients that the salmon have deposited in the forest; the fungi are, in fact, a conduit that makes the salmon available to the other creatures of the ecosystem.

The metaphor was an attempt to illuminate this agency that’s happening under the soil, and excavate the linkage between mushrooms and spawning salmon. This metaphor depends then on a broader, scientific knowledge of the fungi, drawing on a world beyond the direct visual experience of the poet.
 
I would say these represent two extremes of a metaphorical spectrum; at one end of the spectrum, a metaphor captures an immediate sensory impression, while at the other end it attempts to distill a larger hidden story of the creature. Often, these kinds of metaphors can reinforce and illuminate each other, and sometimes a single metaphor will embody both types: capturing simultaneously an immediate sensory connection and a deeper linkage in the same description. Many of my own poems begin when I see some connection in nature that has metaphorical resonance and I become curious about that linkage.

LT:  In “Humpback Whale,” you write,

Is this object huge?
Is it tiny,
a drifting seed on the vast face of the ocean?
Is it fast or slow?
 
Such questions don’t make sense, don’t matter— 

Here and elsewhere, you hint at the wonder of nature, its interconnectedness. In “Kunsoot,” you allude to the “mystery” of nature’s cycles, where salmon drive life “into bears, wolves, trees, insects, and insect-eating birds.” I think a lot of poets writing about the natural world struggle with how to encompass that mystery, how to express their feelings without sounding self-conscious or telling the reader what to think. Yet your poems, by showing us such vivid images, seem to give a necessary distance while at the same time evoking emotion. What advice or suggestions, based on your own experience, do you have for people who are interested in writing poetry about nature and about their feelings when they encounter the natural world? What have you learned along the way about what works, and what doesn’t?

IT: That’s a huge question. I would first like to focus on your observation of poets struggling to “encompass that mystery”. I think actually poets should try to be encompassed themselves. They should try to find themselves within that mystery and attend to the feelings and specifics of that experience. I think the desire to have it fully figured out and defined can actually hold you back.

Another key piece for me is being accountable to your subject. You might want to write a poem about a flower, intending for that creature to be an engine for a point (political or philosophical) that you are trying to make. In my view you have now turned that living thing into a tool for your own agenda, you’ve decided you know more than it, and that your purposes are superior to its own purpose for itself. To me the process of nature writing involves centring this other being and considering what it is saying about itself and from there exploring what that reveals about your relationship with it, and about the wider world around you.

I am not saying that you should just chain yourself to a literal description of the animal or plant or landscape in isolation, far from it!  The subject of your poem may actually be how a flower is resonant with a memory of your grandmother, or a feeling of intense sadness. The effect that a creature or landscape has on you, a blooming trillium for instance, how it stirs your memory or your imagination, these are real operations of that creature on the world, as real as its influence on the bees that pollinate it or the caterpillars that feed on it, or the water that travels through its roots. When I say you should be accountable to your subject, I mean be accountable to the authentic nature of your encounter, and then let that encounter speak through you. When you attend to a being in nature, it may throw light on other things as diverse as politics and philosophy, but to me, those observations should come through recognizing and honouring the being’s own suchness in the world.

I wasn’t always able to do that, when I first started writing. I often had an idea I was trying to force into the poem, and I was less sensitive to when I was imposing something on my subject: a metaphor or an interpretation that I was very fond of, or a desire to somehow enlarge the subject, and put it on a pedestal. I feel now that you do the subject more honour by attending honestly and humbly to how it appears in your life, which lets the genuine wonder and enchantment and power of these encounters with nature speak with less obstruction.

To me, writing a nature poem is like laying the substrate for an imprint, the footprint of the encounter. We choose words, allusions and poetic devices to enhance the poem’s capacity to hold that impression. A footprint in snow reflects properties of both the creature and the snow; in writing the poem I attend to my own self and my own voice as well as this other living being, the poem is that imprint of the encounter.

My wolf poetry for instance is a repeated attempt to take a plaster cast of a wolf’s footprint on my life. To do that I must make myself receptive, I must choose words and images and metaphors that can carry the imprint of the wolf.

The best thing to do of course is to write a lot! I recommend thinking of your poems like sketches. Just as when learning to draw, you are able to compare the drawing to the subject and refine how you can capture the subject with increasing fidelity, you can hold your poems up to the intangible experience or impression you are trying to capture. By writing lots of poems, and recognizing their inevitable incompleteness, you can steadily find your way to the techniques and devices that clarify rather than obstruct. I think it can be helpful to ask yourself, “Are you making this experience intelligible to yourself if you reencountered the poem five or ten years from now?” To do that you might find yourself using language and images in ways you never anticipated, as your attention to the reality of the experience will reshape language to fit its own unique expression in the world.

LT: Are you continuing to write, and if so, are there any particular projects you would like to talk about?
​
IT: I’m continuing to write. I’ve been working on a manuscript for a little bit of time now. It’s nature poetry as well, but not as geographically focused as Green Islands, which focuses on the Great Bear Rainforest in the territory of the Heiltsuk First Nation. This collection is trying to look at a wider variety of creatures without a single regional lens. It’s more of a general collection.
 
LT: We’ll look forward to seeing that! Thank you for your time.
 
IT: A real pleasure! Thank you!

​Ian Thomas is a poet from coastal BC. He is currently a graduate student at the University of Victoria studying Applied Conservation Science. His poetry Chapbook Green Islands: Poems from the Great Bear Rainforest won First Place in the 2023 Raven Chapbooks Poetry Contest. 

---

Ontario resident Lisa Timpf writes poetry, book reviews, short stories, and creative nonfiction. Her speculative poetry collections Cats and Dogs in Space (2025) and In Days to Come (2022) are available from Hiraeth Publishing in print and electronic formats. Lisa is a member of SF Canada and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. You can find out more about her writing projects at http://lisatimpf.blogspot.com/. Lisa is also on Bluesky, @lisatimpf.bsky.social