Thinking With Trees

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.'

ISBN:	9781800171138
Publisher:	Carcanet Press
Imprint:	Carcanet Poetry
Published date:	24 Jun 2021
DEWEY:	821.92
DEWEY edition:	23
Language:	English
Number of pages:	128
Weight:	150g
Height:	136mm
Width:	214mm
Spine width:	14mm

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