Destiny Manifest by Nancy Gaffield
Shearsman Books
The poems in this collection were written over a 10-year period, beginning with 'Springtime in the Rockies'. This poem was sparked by an incident in September 2014 where a bowhunter shot and killed a bull moose in an area where the animals had become habituated to people. The title of the collection is based on the 19th-century ideology, 'Manifest Destiny', the belief that God gave white Americans the right to expand westward across the North American continent. This nationalistic and idealistic belief had devastating consequences for the native inhabitants, for the wildlife and for the land. The belief was also deeply patriarchal, equating masculine with conquest, and the land with a wild, feminized space that needed to be subjugated. It is a twisted ideology (hence the inversion of the title) given renewed credence under the current US administration.
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