In 1951, Elizabeth Bishop, on a traveling fellowship from Bryn Mawr College, chose to explore South America. When she landed in Brazil, dazzled by the landscape and its people, the stopover turned into 15 years.

The influence of that period is evident in her verse (especially in the collection "Questions of Travel," which she dedicated to her Brazilian lover, Lota de Macedo Soares) and in her watercolors and paintings.

Indeed South America, with its extraordinary culture and nature, inspires many artistic reactions, but what a perfect fit for a poet.

Such is the case with Jeffrey Thomson's fourth book of poems, piquantly titled "Birdwatching in Wartime." Like Bishop, Thomson stays away from romantic notions of the exotic, even when accessing an entirely different vocabulary of place. Poem titles such as "Landscape With Swelling and Hives" and "Landscape With Flooded Forest" pay respect to the natural state in which the human is the encroacher and quite possibly the threat:

Tarantulas that hunt fish -- the black goliath and the Peruvian

pinktoe -- strike out across the water as we pass

and a blue-crowned trogon

sits stunned and blinking beneath our headlamps.

We raise the landscape into meaning and return it

damaged in our wake -- the slap

of water off the paddles, the sweep and beam of lights

tunneling through the dark.

In the title poem, the speaker, seeking pleasure in the natural world, travels on a guided tour by boat, only to be left "sick with metaphor" at the way he's unable to escape the war imagery (or the sounds associated with civilization and technology) embedded into his imagination:

In early dawn, a trogon stoic

as a general in the ficus and great

green macaws in the crowns

of wild almonds -- metallic calls,

little soldiers with their chevroned

shoulders. They storm through

the canopy raining almond shells

like shrapnel on the forest floor.

The tensions between nature and culture, the proclamation that "it is no longer/the century you were imagining," are sometimes communicated in moments of levity:

"The farmer has his laptop out/ and enters a herd of data/ into the machine."

In other instances, the disruption of nature by clunky and unpoetic man-made artifact smatters of environmentalist critique:

"When the Park Service truck cleans the/ carcass/off the beach nothing remains, but/the wind."

In any case, Thomson writes verse that is fully aware of the troubled, modern life where the beauty and dangers of the natural world must coexist with the human afflictions because they have been inextricably woven together.

The fragile dance between the physical and the social worlds is fully illustrated in Thomson's long sequence, "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge," in which a speaker sets out to catalog and collect the ingredients that make up his environment. What begins as a researcher's pleasure becomes a frustration at the devastating discovery that the more he looks, the more he affirms that the natural world cannot, in the long run, be dominated or contained, though it can be injured and it can injure back.

But, from this investigation, comes the expression of appreciation through poetry for the "strange menace of power" of both the habitat and in the inhabitant. So when the speaker asks himself, "What have you learned?" he responds:

The words churn, a mob of bitterns

thrash about the corpse of a marten,

hagfish writhe on a gray whale one mile

down as leaf-cutter ants dismember

a nearby guanacaste and moths punish

the porchlight. Shoals of starlings

awash in a mackerel sky, small as

the rain that comes on in the distance.

Although only one poem is titled "Ars Poetica With Pain," this entire collection gestures toward the moment when the speaker is attacked by wasps, "when the Diaspora of venom wrote a question" across the speaker's back. Thomson is a poet who, like Orpheus (and like Bishop, who left Brazil after a heartbreak), suffers for the art of song, in a search for further questions.

For Orpheus, the strings of his broken lyre "hiss and curl into ampersands." For Thomson, the strings of the broken world radiate a music that's simultaneously jarring and seductive.