“Eggtooth,” Jesse Nathan’s debut poetry collection, is alert to the wonderful and terrible things that happen beneath our feet.

In a poem titled “In a Churchyard After Dark, With Ruth,” friends “lounge in a burr oak’s buttress-root couch.” In “Between States,” the “grass sea” of the 19th century Midwest is stolen from Indigenous Americans. In “Boy With Thorns,” a locust tree’s spike — “evolved to ward off long gone / mammoths” — pierces “my plantar fascia’s rivers / of tissue.”

Nathan’s ear for language and eye for the intersection of natural splendor and trauma are informed by his youth — he spent his teens on a Kansas farm — and by the long walks he took in recent years while living in San Francisco’s Sunset District.

“I would just roam around Golden Gate Park, roam around out by Ocean Beach,” Nathan, who now lives in Oakland and teaches literature at UC Berkeley, told the Chronicle in a recent interview.

“Some days I would just write a few lines, and then go out for a long walk and try to memorize them. Memorizing is kind of like putting them in a rock tumbler. It smooths them. Sometimes you want that. And sometimes you want to leave it a little rough.”

Nathan has found the ideal texture for his poems. At least, that’s how two revered poets see it.

“Eggtooth” has a 12-page foreword by Robert Hass, the former U.S. poet laureate who had never before penned a foreword for a first collection. He praises the “pure music” of Nathan’s verse. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Frank Bidart is also a fan. “Such virtuosity promises sublimity,” Bidart wrote of Nathan’s work in a 2021 post on a poetry website. “What talent.”

The poems in “Eggtooth,” a few of which Nathan began writing 15 years ago, are semi-autobiographical. He jokes that the book, like some feature films, is based on a true story: It charts a young man’s personal and artistic development.

Nathan, who recently turned 40, was born in Berkeley. His parents, Kirsten Zerger and Sandy Nathan, were Bay Area labor lawyers who represented, among others, the United Farm Workers union, which was co-founded by Cesar Chavez.

In the 1990s, when Jesse was entering fifth grade, the family moved to a farm in Kansas, a state where Zerger’s family had lived for generations.

内森从他的经验中获得融合图像with reflections on the fraught history of the land itself. His language is by turns finely wrought and bracingly direct.

“Scouts” recalls a childhood encounter with “a boy even stranger than I was.” “(D)uring eighth grade English,” the poem continues, “we got hall passes / and did it in a stall in the bathroom.”

The poem “Dame’s Rocket” is about a flower whose presence in the Midwest evokes the arrival of white settlers and the devastating displacement of Indigenous people: “They say it came with the early whites / before escaping, / as ornaments may, / the farmyards and gardens / for what’s left of the prairie.”

“Dame’s Rocket” is the second poem in “Eggtooth,” a position that “establishes … that the colonization by his ancestors of the land that he grew up in” is not a subject Nathan intends to duck, said Katie Ford, a South Pasadena poet whose poetry workshop Nathan attended in his 20s.

In another poem, “Between States,” Nathan writes that a representative from “the white government” ousted “the Osage and the Kaw, /offering $800 and a few saddles,” after which “I’m imagining / my relatives soon flooding in.”

Nathan’s poetic voice is the product of diverse influences.

As a kid in Berkeley, he was artistic, but this part of him “went dormant” for a time after moving to Kansas. Joining his Kansas high school’s debate team helped nudge him toward a writing career.

Nathan eventually had misgivings about competitive debate. “It teaches you to argue very well, but it doesn’t provide a moral education,” Nathan said, nor “what is constructive in the world.” But his participation fired “the sense of language being very important to me.”

Meanwhile, his family frequently discussed writing. His parents’ Kansas farmhouse was full of old Russian novels, and Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens “was someone that my parents loved to quote at the dinner table as a beautiful writer,” Nathan said.

His ideas about art were also shaped by his time as a student at Kansas’ Bethel College, from which he graduated in 2005. There, and during a period that followed college, his housemates included visual artists, jazz musicians, an actor and a stand-up comic.

“It was like a salon every night in our house,” he said. “We didn’t articulate that at the time, but looking back, I can see what it awakened: I remembered that I was an artist all along. And that’s when I began seriously writing poetry.”

Nathan’s colleagues describe a diligent worker who has at least another book’s worth of impressive poems sitting in a desk drawer. While editing Jesús Castillo’s poetry collection “Remains” for McSweeney’s, Nathan and Castillo had several video phone calls that lasted up to eight hours. “I don’t think I’ve heard of anybody who does that,” Castillo, who lives in Oaxaca, Mexico, said in a phone interview.

Some of Nathan’s writing is indebted to old poetic forms. He prizes the work of many 20th century free-verse poets, but reading poetry from previous centuries reminded him that free verse is “a blip” in literature’s long history. “It’s just the last 100 years, one more variation on this very ancient tradition” that began thousands of years ago in Chinese and Persian languages.

The book’s title poem is an example of Nathan’s talent for melding self-aware metaphor with age-old rigor. A newborn bird can use an egg tooth, a sharp edge on the end of its beak, to break free from an egg — apt imagery for a first book.

“Eggtooth” (the poem) features three carefully structured seven-line stanzas based on a form developed 400 years ago by English poet John Donne. In it, Donne’s ghost tells Nathan to “use me like an eggtooth, break / the shell that shields you.”

Poetry, to Nathan, is a way “of speaking with people long gone, and speaking to people long in the future, assuming we’re still around.” The past is not a museum, he said, but an “intergenerational conversation” to which he and other poets contribute.

Kevin Canfield is a freelance writer.