By Randi Bjornstad

Here’s the very descriptive blurb on the front cover of Barbara Mossberg’s latest book, Clown Cantos, which carries a subhead that says “Everything is Alive in Its Own Way, Singing.”

Barbara Mossberg

Then, on the back cover, there’s a further glimpse into the ebullient poet/author/UO professor’s personal life view: “Is not everything an event that must be sung?”

Mossberg will share what she calls her “Meditations on Fellow Being and Mortal Happiness” on Saturday, Jan. 31, 2026, from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at Tsunami Books, 2585 Willamette St. in Eugene.

She models this book, in a way, on Emily Dickinson’s poem, A Little Madness in the Spring:

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown –
Who ponders this tremendous scene –
This whole Experiment of Green –
As if it were his own!

However, Mossberg’s Clown Cantos is not just a book of poems— not to use the word just to mean something less than something else — it seems to be Mossberg herself taking on Dickinson’s idea of the Clown in the poem, as an ordinary observer and appreciator of the natural world and the human and other forms of nature within it, using poetry, yes, but also essays, observations, musings, humor, and perspective.

And it covers a lot of emotional, practical, and philosophical territory.

In the realm of perspective, for example, in an essay titled Some Facts About Mountain Lions, she quotes a statistic that for an entire century in North America, there were only 13 fatal mountain lion attacks, while “In that same time, more than 15,000 people were killed by lightning; 4,000 by bees; 10,000 by deer; and 1,300 by rattlesnakes.”

There’s a poem titled How I Became a Vegetarian, about watching invertebrate sea animals at the Monterey (California) Aquarium and becoming “eye to eye, locked in an embrace of vision” with a squid which before that had only meant something on a plate at a restaurant.

And so much more: poems about things like the beauty — and fragility — of a worm crossing a street; an essay about the intersection of environments between wild animals and humans in which a young woman who, wakened from a backyard nap to find a bear about to attack her, used her laptop computer to fight it off until she could escape into her house; a poem of grudging homage to the deer that occupy — and munch unashamedly — on her husband’s gardening efforts.

(Author’s Note: To  my surprise, there’s even a poem titled Animals That Saw You: Garbo, written by Mossberg about one my very own cats, who had no compunction during her long life about visiting anyone in our neighborhood — outdoors or in — whom she took a notion to drop in on, welcome or not. The poem, on page 121 of Clown Cantos, captures Garbo’s personality completely, and I miss her still.)

Clown Cantos by Barbara Mossberg: Book reading and signing

When: 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 31, 2026

Where: Tsunami Books, 2585 Willamette St., Eugene

Information: 541-345-8986 or tsunamibooks.org

 

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