Casting deep shade An amble inscribed to beech trees & co

C.D. WRIGHT, renowned poet and essayist, completed "Casting Deep Shade" just before her sudden death in January of 2016. This posthumous book might have been read strictly as elegy, yet Wright, as if presciently marking a trail through the woods for future readers, came up with a sly signpost of a title as "pre-amble" to her work, briskly excluding melancholy even while taking stock of crimes against nature. The title is a trick or a kind of riddle. The gerund points to a " Mache th"like conspiracy of tree and human, each "throwing shade." Here, for example, is Wright on privacy in an all-witnessing age: "For the moment, I can locate you, whosoever you are, or re-imagine you in a keystroke. I can see the tree that cast your lawn in deep shade when you were wearing a linen dress, a string of seed pearls, and no underpants." You get her drift? The book's subtitle reaffirms the need to witness what briefly lives and breathes: "An Amble Inscribed to Beech Trees & Co." "Amble" is how Wright describes her strategic moseying through forests, old-growth bowers and backyards, taking notes. Yet just as "ambling" trundles forward, "inscribed" stays still, denoting words written (or carved) on a surface, in witness. This shifting mediation between dark and light, velocity and stasis, poetry and root-based reporting, informs a style, a tour through what Wright refers to at one point, quoting Verlyn Klinkenborg, as an "arboretum of the mind." Wright's amble began when she was commissioned, years ago, to write an essay on a single beech tree. She became entranced by beeches (and their fellow trees, their "Co."), which led to decades of wideranging research, including interviews with naturalists, historians and arborists - sometimes even "interviews" with trees themselves. Her book could be read alongside Annie Proulx's novel "Barkskins" and other recent literature that considers the complicated relationship between humans and trees. Wright casts a familiar linguistic spell with her thinking-aloud genre-bending voice here: a signature elliptical "prosimetric" style. Yet her book serves a practical purpose too, as an approximation of a field guide (or eccentric "field homage") to beeches and their world. "Casting Deep Shade" is less a conventional text than a facsimile of a tree's growth outward - a cumulative chronology in rings of thought. Wright's tree-visitations are shadowed by the ubiquitous complaints of 21st-century "Thoreaus," bereft among threatened forests and polluted waterways. Wright's own righteous anger is aimed at the usual pestilent enemies of the natural world and ecological balance - parasitic insects or their human kin, "developers, apparatchiks, celebrities, lobbyists" - her zingers outdistancing predictable "green" rants. "My approach is close to ceremonial," Wright notes. "1 go to pay my respects ... palpitating heart in hand" even as she aims "not to anthropomorphize" her subjects. Yet she is most effective when she fails in this goal - as when she stands before arboreal wisdom, the unique communal welfare-consciousness of trees: "Mono-layered leafers like the beech avoid blocking out each other's light by forming a jigsawlike pattern to capture the light." This follows a previous humanizing impulse, spoken ringside: "Atree is a resilient fighter. Likewise poets, single mothers, and teachers." Still, "We respirate, they transpirate." Beech "leafers," she notes, are best planted together in staunch communities, bower-colonies. They remain rooted, of course, with all their movement in situ, but Wright mentions a field book that terms them "time travelers." This sense of being simultaneously planted and in transit perhaps applies to all trees, yet Wright seems particularly sensitive to the way beeches stand still yet witness all. Even their pale scroll-like silver bark moves within the imaginations of human "taggers" who enlist them as messengers: "Witness tree, graffiti tree, tattoo tree, autograph tree, trysting tree, avenue tree, arborglyph, CMT (culturally modified tree).... They say it really doesn't hurt the tree, all that carving. But harm and hurt are different. Beech bark is a tender thing." Tender too is the author's imagination, inscribing her "humans were here" graffiti on a page that began as tree flesh. Writing is a thought-knife, carving into her readers' consciousness. A sense of belonging to a larger collective vision reinforces Wright's fragments, as they remain cryptic yet illuminating in the manner of nature itself, sharing secrets only with those who "read the leaves" closely. Thus Wright allows little direct sunlight on the narrating "1," though she offers a series of pastoral snapshots from her childhood in the Ozarks - memories of growing into the soul of a poet. From the intertwining anecdotes of the etymological, historical, botanical and political, Wright's germinal thesis branches out with a bold statement that "minus the expectations, trees and humans do manifest a common gestalt." What is it? In a typically learned and wide-ranging reference, Wright enlists Simone Weil to explain: "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." Rootedness gives trees the role of eternal witnessing. "I think of a witness tree," Wright says, "as one that stood its ground, when something happened, possibly something no human was meant to see." Trees witnessed the peerless naturalist James Audubon painting his stunning portrait of "Passenger Pigeons": two beautiful birds perched on a beech bough. In tender privacy, the male pigeon gently feeds a seed to the female. (Audubon's precise color reproduction is included among many other extraordinary illustrations in this book, many of them photographs by Wright's longtime collaborator Denny Moers.) After he lovingly painted the pair, as trees looked on, Audubon shot both birds. In his "Ornithological Biography," Audubon records a staggering massacre of thousands of passenger pigeons with similar remove, noting only that the birds will quickly replenish themselves. Passenger pigeons laid just one egg annually. They are now extinct. We are "the next annihilating asteroid," Wright warns, yet she urges humans of conscience to "carry it forward," footnoting the naturalist David Lukas on the "theoretical immortality" of trees. Thus an ice age tree is thought to preserve its seeds under a "mother tree," waiting for "the next climatic change." What hope she offers comes from her own notes - and the famous observation (generally attributed to the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard, as it is here) that there is another world "inside this one." The inestimable sadness of Wright's loss is mitigated, at least for me, by a vision I keep of her as a kick-ass Daphne - turning into a tree, as in the myth, but by her own choice, not a god's coercion. The final page of this book offers her departing bow to us all by way of one of the book's dedicatees, the late poet and activist W S. Merwin, whom Wright quotes: "On the last day of the world / I would want to plant a tree." Wright's fragments remain cryptic yet illuminating in the manner of nature itself. CAROL MUSKE-DUKES is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection "Blue Rose."

MacArthur fellow Wright (1949-2016) honed her vernacular and her politically and socially astute poetry over 16 genre-blending collections, including One with Others (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award). She always kept one foot in her native Ozarks while consistently expanding her idea of what a single life, a single place, or a single way of thinking could embrace. After her sudden death, Copper Canyon released her then recently completed Shallcross, which is now followed by this 17th book. Composed of snippets of prose on ecological histories, historical narratives, folklore, etymologies, personal asides, travel memoir, cultural commentary, and moving family autobiography, the book begins as a loving naturalist's ode to the beech tree and branches out to touch a dizzying array of international, transhistorical topics, not least among them what it means to be alive. Fans of Wright will find what they're looking for in this collection, which is presented as a three-panel, hardcover box and featuring interstitial photographs of Beeches by Denny Moers. But the writing itself sometimes feels unfinished, lacking some of the sharpness that made Wright such an astute observer of other lives and of our world. The result is a kind of traveler's diary-with all the imperfection that term affords-one anchored by a deep, abiding respect for what Wright termed "beech-consciousness." (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

EVERY LIVING THING COMPETES: Water for oxygen, oxygen for water, oxygen and water for pore space in the soil. If New York isour nerve center for competition Los Angeles is the slacker Then there are the Ozarks of Arkansas birthplace of Walmart(4000 stores in the US, 2000 in Mexico alone) The triumph was Teotihuacan City of the Godsbuilt in the shadow of the Pyramidof the Moon & the Pyramid of the Sun, a Supercenter, the Temple of Samin the middle of Elda Pineda's alfalfa field backed by bribes to change the zoningCompetition the Walmart wayDon't blame it on the Mexicanos No arruinar las ruinas was the cry in the callesWhere have all the one-person stalls and pepper trees(Shinus molle) of the wide valley gone ask the Sons of Sam []A tree can only take so many insults. Esp when geriatric and distressed. Commonly a tree dies of hunger or thirst. As did my mother, as a result of Alzheimer's. []A couple noticed a problem with their beeches on their land in Harbor Springs, MI, two years ago: We'll be in bed sometimes, and we'll just hear: Whooomp! Jojoba oil is used for aphids. If it comes to that. Replaced sperm oil from whales and is used against mildew. Being used copiously in fact. As whale sperm once was. There is always picking them off one by one. Parasitic wasps attack aphids. As do ladybugs, the one bug nobody can deny. A ladybug will devour thousands of aphids in its itsy busy bitsy life. (Keep refrigerated until use.)[]Trees live long lives. Anything can happen. Come ice or wind or fire, or human disturbance, the effects are broad and dragged out. Out of angiosperms, oak, beech, elms, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. 120 million years ago. Mast from F. grandifolia may be the most important food source for Ursus americana, the American black bear. It would take a lot of nuts to stuff a hungry bear. Esp way up north where the woods are dominated by spruce. Did you know that the leaf of F. grandifolia produces the most nitrogen of all the trees in North America. As a nitrogen sink in the soil however, their mortality rate impacts the nitrogen cycle. Under their abundant canopy, scant sky. [] Long long ago they were all over Antarctica. And America with its own genus. The young ones need care. The old generally prefer to be undisturbed. Sometimes they are so tall and straight and smooth they look like nothing so much as columns of limestone. [] The ashes of poet Robert Creeley (1926-2005) are buried under a beech at Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA: Look at the light of this hour The word trimmed back to the last fore-bearing leaf. Onward, Bob. (When I dispatched photographer Denny Moers to get a shot of Creeley's tree, his tripod fell over on the poet's stone, breaking the back plate of his camera. After he uncovered the broken part in the mast, he rushed back to his car to see if he had something-masking tape, band-aide or rubber band he could use to secure the plate and finish his shoot in the vanishing light. He found only a pack of old condoms. Wrapped one around the camera, took aim and called it a day. Safe to say, Bob would have liked that. His widow Penelope told Denny that Bob & Co had chugged over the Pyrenees by pissing into the gas tank.)[] One claim to the invention of movable type belongs to Laurens Janszoon Coster between 1423 and 1440. Recently, the title has shifted back to Gutenberg. Coster was alleged to have cut letters out of beechwood for children. Wrapping them in parchment, the letters left impressions on the parchment giving him the idea of moveable type. Historians now argue there was no such man as Laurens Janszoon Coster, leaving the proud citizens of Haarlem bereft. No one is disputing that the beech played an inspirational role. For cathedrals as well. [] Toronto, June 3, 2014: (I must first acknowledge the 36th anniversary of the death of poet Frank Stanford. As a land surveyor he took a chainsaw to many a tree in the dense woods of the Ozarks. His friend Willett would often be furious with him if he didn't know what he was taking down before revving up). But jogging in the park, at my sluggish tempo, near the hotel, I slammed smack dab into a pretty copper. I wanted to pluck just one leaf (I am an addicted plucker, self-limiting to one leaf). The one I happened to flip over was wall-to-wall with the beech blight aphid (Grylloprociphilus imbricator). Their sole self-defense is to raise their hind ends and sway in unison. Little fuckers.* In Toronto, I met a physically vulnerable, emotionally spirited English poet with a rare, agonizing disease, developed from collodion ichthyosis. When drugs offered no relief or necessitated tapering off, NATURE, she vowed (in all caps), was the only healer. Afflicted since birth, she recalled suffering greatly one day as a child, going outside and lying down on her back in the grass. When she stood up she beheld a glimmer of blue silhouetting her body that quickly dematerialized. She ran inside to tell her parents, who were watching the telly, and they told her not to worry about it. The phenomenon never recurred, but lying down next to the earth continued to soothe her. It was not enough to sit in the shade on a bench. Total physical contact was essential to receive the succor offered. I would lie in the duff of a fern leaf in Warren, RI, were distress, mental or physical, to guide me there. Excerpted from Casting Deep Shade by C. D. Wright All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.