- 120 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Thinking with Trees
About this book
Winner of the Poetry Category OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2022
An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021
A White Review Book of the Year 2021
Jason Allen-Paisant grew up in a village in central Jamaica. 'Trees were all around, ' he writes, 'we often went to the yam ground, my grandmother's cultivation plot. When I think of my childhood, I see myself entering a deep woodland with cedars and logwood all around. [...] The muscular guango trees were like beings among whom we lived.'
Now he lives in Leeds, near a forest where he goes walking. 'Here, trees represent an alternative space, a refuge from an ultra-consumerist culture...' And even as they help him recover his connections with nature, these poems are inevitably political.
As Malika Booker writes, 'Allen-Paisant's poetic ruminations deceptively radicalise Wordsworth's pastoral scenic daffodils. The collection racializes contemporary ecological poetics and its power lies in Allen-Paisant's subtle destabilization of the ordinary dog walker's right to space, territory, property and leisure by positioning the colonised Black male body's complicated and unsafe reality in these spaces.'
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Information
Table of contents
- Title Page
- Contents
- Dedication
- Crossing the Threshold
- Naming
- Walking with the Word ‘Tree’
- Spring
- Daffodils (Speculation on Future Blackness)
- Finding Space (I)
- Climb with More Singing
- Rhododendrons
- Finding Space (II)
- On the First Day of Autumn
- Going Still
- Listen
- Black Walking
- Among the Great Oaks in Autumn
- But What Are these Woods Anyway?
- Leisure (I)
- All of a Sudden
- Finding Space (III)
- Right Now I’m Standing
- Autumn
- Leisure (II)
- Those Who Can Afford Time
- Essay on Dog Walking (I)
- Essay on Dog Walking (II)
- Masochism
- On Property
- Behaviour (A Black Man Enters the Woods)
- An Evening Walk When Spring Is Already Old
- Black Holes
- Rhododendrons on the River
- Within Full of Canopies
- Climbing Trees
- Coming from the Ground
- Vein of Stone amid the Branches
- Fallen Beech
- Treeness
- The Squirrel Hour
- A Tree and Two Humans
- Seagulls
- Roots
- For Those Who Steal Away
- Essay on Dog Walking (III)
- Essay on Dog Walking (IV)
- Logwood
- Plague Walks
- Do You Feel Them Looking at You?
- Fear of Men
- Cho-Cho Walks
- Twilight in Roundhay
- Notes & Acknowledgements
- About the Author
- Copyright
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