Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2019. 160 pages. $32.00.
In her book The Hour of Land, Terry Tempest Williams writes, “If we can learn to listen to the land, we can learn to listen to each other. This is the beginning of ceremony.” She asks what the effect would be if national parks “became places of conscience instead of places of consumption?” In recent decades there have been few poets more conscientious than C. D. Wright. In book-length poetry projects such as One With Others and One Big Self, she patented a style that borrowed from the documentary techniques of Muriel Rukeyser and brimmed with luscious description as well as lustrous bits of vernacular. Wright’s ear was as open as her heart, keen to set down calamities private and public, gathering the moments and manners of particular lives while also investigating larger patterns such as the US Civil Rights movement and the current carceral state.
Shallcross, the first of Wright’s collections to appear after her sudden death in 2016, mixed short lyric poems with a longer sequence dedicated to murder victims in New Orleans. Now readers can dwell in Casting Deep Shade, a book that is also an arboretum. Like Walden, Casting Deep Shade emerges from a combined commitment to ethics and ecology, and recognizes that love of nature cannot be separated from love of justice. Wright’s fascination with beech trees has yielded a book that contains multitudes. The aesthetic qualities of the book recall the work of W.G. Sebald, whose inclusion of photographs and ephemera alongside his text made for an experience that was more than reading. Sebald invited readers to journey through the haunted house of history, where the terrors of the Holocaust and colonialism coexisted with the delights of gardening, couture, and cuisine. Wright compels us to see the trees that once comprised a forest.
One of the gifts of her imagination is the insight of implication. In a passage where she acknowledges she had not been able yet to read Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, Wright notes “I sit here eating ‘carefully watched over’ cashews grown in India, from one of the 102 billion plastic bags used annually in the US, wearing a linen shirt (albeit secondhand) made in China, jeans fabrique en Haiti, Delta Blues Museum T-shirt made in Honduras . . . a walking, talking profligate.” If she was, as we all are, profligate, she was also prophet. She spoke to and for trees, and the creatures that owe their well being to arboreal health. She refers to “my standing brothers and sisters, the hardwoods.” Her work documents “the buds of tree consciousness.” Like so much of her language, that phrase operates in multiple planes, conjuring both human awareness of trees, and the fact that trees themselves are conscious, as well as the concrete responsibility of a poet: to cast an image, as a tree casts shade through its limbs and buds. Though any book written about trees in our modern era will necessarily be rife with dire predictions and realities, Casting Deep Shade is hardly dour. Subtitled “An Amble Inscribed to Beech Trees & Co.,” it has the charm and healing properties of a walk in the woods.
“He plants trees!” Yelena breathlessly exclaims of Astrov in Uncle Vanya, as though nothing else about the doctor is quite as sexy as his way with saplings. Wright no doubt would have shared Yelena’s adoration, and throughout the course of the book introduces us to a variety of arborists, tree historians, gardeners, ecojustice warriors, and various other folks she encountered as her love for and fascination with beeches grew and grew. Casting Deep Shade is clarion call and corrective, immersing readers in the infinite pleasures of trees as well as the hazards posed by our careless, endless materialism, a view of the forest that sees condos and golf courses rather than habitats for spiders and sparrows. To read this book is to fall in love with beeches, and in hate with developers. In one of the many indications of climate change, Wright observes, “Beeches don’t grow in west Texas and are declining in east Texas as it gets hotter and hotter.”
Formally, Casting Deep Shade is unique, eclectic, peripatetic, shifting from paragraphs to single lines and other stanzaic shapes. We follow Wright to Robert Creeley’s grave, which enjoys the supervision of a beech, and at certain times of year, the decoration of “bluebells under the canopy, so familiar to the beech woods of England.”
Look
at
the
light
of
this
hour.
This stanza pays homage to both Creeley and the beech, offering the reader room. The space around the words suggests silence, that prelude to death, while the words themselves suggest wonder, breath, life. “The word trimmed back to the fore-bearing leaf. Onward, Bob.” Wright also relates the intimacy beeches enjoyed with Gerard Manley Hopkins, noting that the felling of one to permit more light into his Oxford dorm room “dogged the poet/priest for the rest of his days.” A beech at his grandparents’ home was, Wright marvels, “boy Gerard’s idea of glory.” It’s not just poets who should appreciate a close connection with beeches. Wright reports Olavi Huikari’s statistic that “a full half of our DNA is held in common with them. Half.” Emphasis hers.
Through her exhaustive compilation of data, stories, and images, Wright has made a gift that future generations will consult, much as she turned to the hundreds of sources listed in her bibliography. In the pages of Casting Deep Shade, students of poetry, forestry, ecology, history, and geography will find hilarious anecdotes about “glory holes,” terrific puns, and parenthetical declarations, e.g., “Beech crotches have always impressed me as the sexiest of any tree!” There are home remedies for childhood asthma, dismal facts about American literacy, and etymological delights such as the relationship between beech and book.
First page
of literature
in Sanskrit
on beech
the runic tablets
on beech
First books
were beech
in Sanskrit
the Vedas
who knows
who wrote
Old English
on bound
beech
bark
By turns mystical, matter-of-fact, outraged, meditative, Wright sings tunes lovely, anguished, and adoring to her beloved beeches. Like an old-fashioned specimen book, she has pressed samples in the form of botanical drawings, Audubon paintings, maps, family Polaroids, and photographs that recall those of fellow southerner Sally Mann’s experiments with scale in her efforts to capture landscapes and Civil War battlefields. Like the light of the world, the light of this book is at times eerie, beguiling, harsh, and nourishing. Many images presented in the book bear the ordinary grace of any nature-lover’s Instagram post, while others are spectral, bleached out, as though the trees, like Wright, are trying to contact us from a realm to which we lack regular access.
You can read the book straight through, as you would a memoir or novel, or you can drop in here and there, the way you might visit and revisit a favorite gallery in a museum, or a favorite tree in a cemetery. As I look back through my copy, I already anticipate future readings when I might study more closely the map of the Ohio River that appears on page twenty-five, or the miniature reproduction of Jean-François Millet’s Bird’s-Nesters (p. 101). The images of the book are not mere illustrations, but essential guides through the marvelous terrain of Wright’s mind. She was, in addition to all her other virtues as a book-maker, an exemplary archivist, savoring and saving the perfect bit of dialogue, the necessary data, the just-right photograph. The last image in the book (p. 241) shows Wright in front of a splendid, sinewy beech whose branches squiggle out above her like ideas of the future.
In this and her other late books, Wright expanded on what a collection of poetry might be: part diary, part investigative journalism, prosy in some places and lushly lyrical in others. Her work was engaged with that essential exclamation of Thoreau: “Contact!” She rejected the alienation perpetrated and perpetuated by colonialism, white supremacy, industrial agriculture, etc. In her work I find a similar kind of healing to what I encountered several years ago at an art gallery in Queens where there was an exhibit paying homage to Elizabeth Bishop’s (write it!) flawless villanelle “One Art.” The exhibit, by the artist Anya Gallacio, consisted of a weeping cherry tree which had been broken into many pieces and reassembled inside the gallery to resemble the living tree that had once graced and been graced with—sunlight, soil, air. “Do you still hang your words ten years in air?” Robert Lowell asked Bishop in a poem. Bishop was famous for her meticulous craft, agonizing over a line, a word, for years. A poet is broken by experience, the world’s injustices, love lost, time’s swift transitions, and from the broken roots, trunk, and limbs she fashions blossoms. Her words travel from the forest of her life into the gallery of the page. We are each a woods that’s been logged.
Dedicated to the Merwins, Paula and William, Casting Deep Shade closes with these lines from Merwin’s poem “Place”: “On the last day of the world / I would want to plant a tree.” The poem which follows “Place” in The Rain in the Trees, “Witness,” is just four lines:
I want to tell what the forests
were likeI will have to speak
in a forgotten language
C. D. Wright was fluent in forgotten languages, as Casting Deep Shade bears witness. May we remember, and go on remembering.