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Poems About Trees (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series)
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About Poems About Trees
Product Description A unique anthology of poems--from around the world and through the ages--that celebrate trees. For thousands of years humans have variously worshipped trees, made use of them, admired them, and destroyed them--and poets have long chronicled the relationship. Poets from Homer and Virgil to Wordsworth, Whitman, and Thoreau, from Su Tung P'o and Basho to Czeslaw Milosz and W. S. Merwin have celebrated sacred groves, wild woodlands, and bountiful orchards, and the results include some of our most beloved poems. Robert Frost's "Birches," Marianne Moore's "The Camperdown Elm," Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Binsey Poplars," and Zbigniew Herbert's "Sequoia" stand tall beside Eugenio Montale's "The Lemon Trees," Yves Bonnefoy's "The Apples," Bertolt Brecht's "The Plum Tree," D. H. Lawrence's "The Almond Tree," and A. E. Housman's "Loveliest of Trees." Whether showing their subjects being planted or felled, cherished or lamented, towering in forests or flowering in backyards, the poems collected here pay lyrical tribute to these majestic beings with whom we share the earth. About the Author HARRY THOMAS is the editor of Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy (Penguin, 1993) and Montale in English (Penguin, 2002). His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in dozens of magazines. He is editor in chief of Handsel Books, an imprint of Other Press and an affiliate of W. W. Norton. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PREFACE by Stanley Plumly Harry Thomas has arranged his anthology of tree poems as much around complex attitudes toward trees as dramatic evocations of their arboreal being: ranging from the ‘‘gladness’’ of the fact of them to their natural, named, and significant presences to – sadly but beautifully – their ‘‘gladness gone.’’ Which is to say Thomas’ selection is emotional as well as analytical, political as well as philosophical, as it moves from celebration to meditation, from the reality and imagination of what trees are to a deepening awareness of what their loss means. The range of poets is equally rich in variety, nationality, and history. Though the overall emphasis may be Anglo-American and the living moment especially contemporaneous, the individual poems develop in perspective from Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Georgics to examples from Matsuo Basho, and Yosa Buson to any number of international figures such as Eugenio Montale, Czeslaw Milosz, Bertolt Brecht, Giorgio Bassani and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, in first-rate translations by Lee Gerlach, Robert Hass, Edwin Morgan, Jamie McKendrick and Paul Muldoon. Indeed, ‘‘From all these trees,/in the salads, the soup, everywhere,/cherry blossoms fall’’ – writes the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho in the Hass version. The mixture of tradition, innovation, and generation is as exciting as it is informing. You cannot assemble a tree anthology of poems without such classics as Wordsworth’s ‘‘Nutting’’ or Housman’s ‘‘Loveliest of Trees’’ or Whitman’s ‘‘I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing’’ or Marianne Moore’s ‘‘The Camperdown Elm.’’ You cannot test the quality of the originality of the poetry without Montale’s ‘‘The Lemon Trees’’ or Seamus Heaney’s ‘‘The Birch Grove’’ or Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘‘The Apple Orchard’’ (translated by Seamus Heaney.) You cannot include the present without pairing such poems as Mary Oliver’s ‘‘The Black Walnut Tree’’ with Ellen Bryant Voigt’s ‘‘Landscape, Dense with Trees’ or Judith Wright’s lyrical ‘‘Train Journey’’ with her massive meditation ‘‘The Cedars’’ or James Wright’s elegiac ‘‘To a Blossoming Pear Tree’’ with Marvin Bell’s lovely lament ‘‘These-Green-Going-to- Yellow.’’ In terms of tone and poetic temperament, Thomas has effectively exercised his editorial rights to choices that are not only carefully crafted but open-ended in form and ambition; he values discipline and understatement but at the same time admires ‘‘tree’’ poems that think with their hearts, that enla
