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.'
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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.'
14.99 In Stock
Thinking with Trees

Thinking with Trees

by Jason Allen-Paisant
Thinking with Trees

Thinking with Trees

by Jason Allen-Paisant

Paperback

$14.99 
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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.'

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781800171138
Publisher: Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date: 08/26/2021
Pages: 120
Sales rank: 329,947
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Jason Allen-Paisant is from a village called Coffee Grove in Manchester, Jamaica. He is Lecturer in Caribbean Poetry & Decolonial Thought in the School of English at the University of Leeds, where he is also the Director of the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. He serves on the editorial board of Callaloo: Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters. He holds a doctorate in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford, and he speaks seven languages. He lives in Leeds.

Table of Contents

Crossing the Threshold 1

Naming 9

Walking with the Word 'Tree' 12

Spring 16

Daffodils (Speculation on Future Blackness) 17

Finding Space (I) 18

Climb with More Singing 19

Rhododendrons 20

Finding Space (II) 21

On the First Day of Autumn 23

Going Still 25

Listen 27

Black Walking 29

Among the Great Oaks in Autumn 30

But What Are these Woods Anyway? 31

Leisure (I) 33

All of a Sudden 34

Finding Space (III) 36

Right Now I'm Standing 38

Autumn 40

Leisure (II) 41

Those Who Can Afford Time 42

Essay on Dog Walking (I) 44

Essay on Dog Walking (II) 46

Masochism 50

On Property 52

Behaviour (A Black Man Enters the Woods) 55

An Evening Walk When Spring Is Already Old 57

Black Holes 58

Rhododendrons on the River 59

Within Full of Canopies 60

Climbing Trees 61

Coming from the Ground 63

Vein of Stone amid the Branches 64

Fallen Beech 66

Treeness 68

The Squirrel Hour 70

A Tree and Two Humans 71

Seagulls 72

Roots 73

For Those Who Steal Away 75

Essay on Dog Walking (III) 80

Essay on Dog Walking (IV) 81

Logwood 83

Plague Walks 91

Do You Feel Them Looking at You? 102

Fear of Men 104

Cho-Cho Walks 105

Twilight in Roundhay 107

Notes & Acknowledgements 109

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