Second Nature: Poems (Paperback or Softback)

In these poems, Eric Paul Shaffer explores second nature, “a practice natural enough to look natural.” Practice means acting within every moment and also means refining the most elegant and economical way to act. Practice is both what we do and what we learn to do well. These simultaneous senses reveal our second nature, whether one reads bumper stickers, counts magpies, imagines a brother as a river, grieves a lost mango tree, or squints the eye just enough to see clearly.

Always outside of ourselves, the world looks just so
when we travel far enough. Inked and painted lines
are ours, drawn from us, not the sky,
not the earth, not even the whorls at the tip of a finger.

Look softly, and the world blurs. Edges vanish. I slacken
my sight and exfine the world, erase brinks,
mute borders, and then I see. In a fade of red, I see a world
in flux. In a mist of green, I see what I should never expect.

In a splash of white, I see an eternity
no one wants. I see all the same way snow smooths
the verge of a cliff and deroughs the peaks of mountains.
— from “Exfinition”

Eric Paul Shaffer is author of ten volumes of poetry, most recently Green Leaves: Selected & New Poems and Free Speech, both from Coyote Arts. More than 650 of his poems have been published in Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, England, Germany, India, Iran, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Scotland, Singapore, Wales, and the United States. A few have been translated into Esperanto, Farsi, or Spanish. His work appears in twenty-seven anthologies, including Fire and Rain: EcoPoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager, 2018), The EcoPoetry Anthology (Trinity UP, 2013), Jack London Is Dead: Contemporary Euro-American Poetry in Hawai'i (Tinfish, 2013), 100 Poets Against the War (Salt, 2003), and The Soul Unearthed (Tarcher/Putnam, 1996).Shaffer's first novel Burn & Learn, or Memoirs of the Cenozoic Era was published in 2009. Other fiction appears in Bakunin, Bamboo Ridge, Natural Bridge, and News from the Republic of Letters, and in two chapbooks, You Are Here (2004) and The Felony Stick (2006).Shaffer received Hawai'i's 2002 Elliot Cades Award for Literature to an established writer; Ka Palapala Po'okela Book Awards for Lāhaina Noon (2006) and Even Further West (2019); the 2009 James M. Vaughan Award for Poetry; Lorin Tarr Gill Writing Competition Awards (Poetry, first place, 2010; Nonfiction, first place, 2020; Poetry, third place, 2020). Shaffer received a poetry fellowship to attend the 2006 Summer Fishtrap Writers Workshop. In 2015, he was a visiting poetry faculty member at the 23rd Annual Jackson Hole Writers Conference in Wyoming, and has been a returning presenter, delivering the Keynote Address in 2013, at the Ko'olau Writers Workshops sponsored by Hawai'i Pacific University, a visiting poet and guest of the School of Language & Literature and SLANT: A Journal of Poetry at the University of Central Arkansas in 2024, and keynote speaker and presenter at The Poets' Roundtable of Arkansas, the state affiliate member of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, on Poetry Day 2025.Shaffer lives on the island of O'ahu.