Thinking with Trees

By Jason Allen-Paisant

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1800171137
• ISBN13: 9781800171138
• Release Date: August 2021
• Publisher: Carcanet Press
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.4" x 8.6"