Thinking with Trees

Allen-Paisant, Jason

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.

’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.’
-Malika Booker

Kustantaja: UKBooks
Sidosasu:
ean: 9781800171138
Ilmestymisvuosi: 2021
Kirjastoluokka: 822
Hyllypaikka (Sivullinen kirjakauppa): 2309Runot