Thinking with Trees - by Jason Allen-Paisant (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

"Jason Allen-Paisant deftly inscribes his own signature on worlds inner and outer in these gorgeous poems. The future of Caribbean lyric poetry is in great hands."--Lorna Goodison, author of From Harvey River

Jason Allen-Paisant has emerged in recent years as one of the most celebrated poets in the UK and across the West Indies. Winner already of the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize, his writing has been acclaimed for its artistry and the fresh perspective it offers on the relationship of the African diaspora to place and the natural world.

In this, his debut collection of poems, he recalls an idyllic boyhood in his native Jamaica, where the roots of guango and yam vines burrow deep into the bauxite soil. Walking with his grandmother to reach the yam fields she worked, he envisions how "the muscular guango trees were like beings among whom we lived." Transplanted to England, where he lives and works now, he describes lovely rambles in entirely different landscapes. But Allen-Paisant's experience in the dense woodlands around Leeds is complex--unleashed dogs are welcome, and Black men are found suspect. "Try to imagine daffodils / in the hands of a black family / on a black walk / in spring," he writes, in a radical response to Wordsworth's pastoral.

Subversive in its excavation of an imperialist past and wonderfully generous in its exploration of alternative worldviews, Thinking with Trees represents the arrival in North America of poems that expand roots and leaves into something deeper, richer, less compromising.

Review Quotes

Praise for Thinking with Trees

Shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize

Winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature

An Irish Times Best Poetry Book

A White Review Book of the Year

"How exciting that Jason Allen-Paisant's Thinking with Trees is now available in the US. Here is a stunning collection of poems that gives you much of what you hope for from the title--poems of arboreal revelry that exalt the ecology of trees growing over and under everything, from the tiny claws of squirrels, to the vast woodlands where life seeks shelter and refuge. Allen-Paisant's trees root spells and history. The poems are contemporary, lush, and verdant. They amble and lament from the perspective of a wanderer. At the heart of this collection is a listener whose migrant restlessness relies heavily on tenderness, but is vulnerable both to woodland beasts, and to predators who lay in wait at 'sundown on the curtain of trees.' Throughout, Allen-Paisant's poems resist the urge of taxonomy, of possession and of easy stroll. Thinking with Trees is a meditation on what the forest can teach us about the land. A quiet and resonant work to be read again and again."--francine j. harris, author of Here Is the Sweet Hand

"Thinking with Trees connects us, through language, to the ever-unfolding universe that nature and time offer to those who pause and attend the gorgeous sensorium. Jason Allen-Paisant's poems make those connections all the more poignant because such immense barriers have been erected to prevent their threading--socially, culturally, geographically, and even legally. The speaker must 'soften his look of threatening' in order to access the glories of ordinary living things on earth--trees, flowers, soil, leaves, animals, more--that are anything but, which sharpens both the beauty and the painful outrage that systemic exclusion incites. And yet, this impressive book is a kind invitation to take up space anyway--'I have space for you in my blood, ' the opening poem announces--and to make space for wonder and other people and delight, and be respectfully curious about what we observe of our world(s) and one another. From the richness of 'black soil' to 'daffodils / in the hands of a black family / on a black walk / in spring, ' the poems pay brilliant attention to the ways we find our place(s) amid present and future living, in the fullest sense. We are sorely in need of such praise as this."--Khadijah Queen, author of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

"Allen-Paisant is uncompromising when digging down through the undergrowth of our imperialist past--and yet he succeeds in replanting new narratives in the same soil where these toxic ideologies used to, and still, reside."--Poetry London

"To hear this new sound, one is invited to cross the threshold into something 'accidental / so entire so free, ' away from an exclusive lyric past and beyond the inherited traumas of slave labour. This crossing, the speaker of poems like 'Black Walking' informs us, is not only a physical passage but a leap over the precipice of racial asymmetry."--The Poetry Review

"Allen-Paisant has penned a debut that may be years ahead of its time."--Anthony Anaxagorou, author of Heritage Aesthetics

"Jason Allen-Paisant deftly inscribes his own signature on worlds inner and outer in these gorgeous poems. The future of Caribbean lyric poetry is in great hands."--Lorna Goodison, author of Mother Muse

"Jason Allen-Paisant maps a complex and multifaceted internal landscape in these astounding poems. How does the person occupy a poem? How does the poem speak back to a person? How does a poem then speak to the world? [. . .] Tough queries on language and personhood are posed through Paisant's extraordinary line and sense of image; every poem seems a painting with their flashes of colour, their broad scope of place, the vivid characters of the people and animals who inhabit them. In these quietly subversive lyrics, expectations are undone, of ecologies, of people, of poems: trees, dogs, thoughts, cells, the daily world here is rendered wholly new."--Rachael Allen

"Allen-Paisant's poetic ruminations deceptively radicalise Wordsworth's pastoral scenic daffodils; here the body is never restful or relaxed due to a lingering unease in these British parks and woodlands. He employs the usual meditative tropes found in nature writing, in order to exploit and amplify the psychological sense of entitlement this relationship with the land denotes. These penetrable lyrical verses and essays deconstruct democratic notions of green space in the British landscape by racialising contemporary ecological poetics. The collection's 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, author of New Daughters of Africa

"These observant poems lay their burdens down by the rivers of Babylon and try to sing the Lord's song in a strange land. What might it mean for the black body to experience nature, not as labour, but as leisure? What might it mean to simply walk through a park and observe the birds and the trees? The poems are beautiful and gentle, but the questions they raise are difficult and important."--Kei Miller, author of Things I Have Withheld

"Original, masterful, and beautiful [. . .] invites us to think about a perpetual condition of 'marronage' for the Caribbean writer."--Bocas Prize Judges