The legend begins thus: In 1967 — or maybe it was ’66 — a pet store truck overturned in Long Island, sending a few dozen finger-length Italian wall lizards scampering into the bushes of Garden City. There Podarcis siculus thrived, slurping up arthropods along rock walls and sidewalks, dodging beaks and claws and tires. Over the decades, the lizards, elegant Mediterranean natives whose emerald torsos taper to long pewter tails, turned up in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, flourishing in drainage ditches and grassy cemeteries. One amateur biologist estimated their dispersal rate at a block per year.
As far as scientists knew, however, the animals didn’t trespass north of New York City. Until, this summer, in Hastings-on-Hudson — the Westchester town, 40 minutes above the city by rail, where I grew up — I saw one.
At the end of the year, the New York Times Book Review featured the Year in Poetry, covering 2015 collections by poets here and abroad, and other poetry features, including well-known people who talked about their favorite poems. The section’s Letters department always brings a range of opinions; the comments on the poetry issue followed in this vein. Some people were thrilled, others less so. But one interesting letter took issue with the cover itself, which spelled out The Year in Poetry in a series of colored dots.
