Wind, Trees
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A politically urgent yet timeless collection that studies
the devastating failings of humanity and the redemptive possibilities of love.
In Wind, Trees, John Freeman presents a meditation on
power and loss, change and adaptation. What can the trees teach us about
inhabiting space together? What might we gain if we admit we do not control the
wind, and cannot possibly carry all we’ve been handed? Offering a stark moral critique
of pandemic self-preservation—as “justifications grew / with greed like vines /
up the side of a tree / taking everything”—Wind, Trees joins the ranks
of politically urgent yet timeless collections like The Lice by W.S.
Merwin. Through narrative lyric and metaphysical pulse, meandering thought and
punctuating quiet, Freeman studies the devastating failings of humanity and the
redemptive possibilities of love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Freeman's ruminative, mournful, and precise follow-up to The Park, he says goodbye to the known world while savoring everything within it, even as it burns. The poems urge the reader to slow down, the line-breaks skillfully moving against the grain of natural phrasing, leaning toward "a world/ where imagination and remembrance are the same thing." Freeman is drawn to "four o'clock/ dark beginning like a rumor" and "dawn's green/ glove," times when the natural world's presence pushes past the distractions of daily life, allowing memories to surface. Climate change is the heart of this collection, the white-hot whiff of environmental disaster lying just over the next hill, fueling many of Freeman's reverent descriptions of trees: "the trees loom/ overhead—as they have since whale/ fat powered streetlamps—inhaling/ the latest storm to be weathered, piping/ out clean air, even here." In a poem that is more explicitly political, he uses rhyme: "I'm closing the doors shutting the window/ cranking the thermostat to blue, now you won't see/ me and I can't see you." Elsewhere, he observes a heron in a trash-filled brook and asks, "what are we for?/ To watch, mourn, to exclaim gladly?" These deep and timely meditations beautifully illuminate humanity's plight.
