{"product_id":"poems-about-trees-isbn-9781101908150","title":"Poems About Trees","description":"\u003cb\u003eA unique anthology of poems—from around the world and through the ages—that celebrate trees. AN EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POET.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e For thousands of years humans have variously worshipped trees, made use of them, admired them, and destroyed them—and poets have long chronicled the relationship. Poets from Homer and Virgil to Wordsworth, Whitman, and Thoreau, from Su Tung P'o and Basho to Czeslaw Milosz and W. S. Merwin have celebrated sacred groves, wild woodlands, and bountiful orchards, and the results include some of our most beloved poems.\u003cbr\u003e Whether showing their subjects being planted or felled, cherished or lamented, towering in forests or flowering in backyards, the poems collected here pay lyrical tribute to these majestic beings with whom we share the earth.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eIncludes:\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e • “Birches\" by Robert Frost\u003cbr\u003e • “The Camperdown Elm” by Marianne Moore\u003cbr\u003e • “Binsey Poplars” by Gerard Manley Hopkins\u003cbr\u003e • “Sequoia\" by Zbigniew Herbert\u003cbr\u003e • “The Lemon Trees\" by Eugenio Montale\u003cbr\u003e • “The Apples\" by Yves Bonnefoy\u003cbr\u003e • “The Plum Tree\" by Bertolt Brecht\u003cbr\u003e • “The Almond Tree\" by D.H. Lawrence\u003cbr\u003e • “The Loveliest of Trees\" by A.E. Housman\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.Preface by Stanley Plumly\u003cbr\u003eIntroduction by Harry Thomas\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eGladness\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Homer, from \u003ci\u003eThe Odyssey                      \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e William Wordsworth, Nutting\u003cbr\u003e Edward Thomas, The Ash Grove\u003cbr\u003e Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ash-Boughs\u003cbr\u003e Ralph Waldo Emerson, Woods, A Prose Sonnet\u003cbr\u003e Henry David Thoreau, from \u003ci\u003eJournal\u003c\/i\u003e, December 20, 1851\u003cbr\u003e Walt Whitman, Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone\u003cbr\u003e James Dickey, Trees and Cattle\u003cbr\u003e Yves Bonnefoy, Lightning\u003cbr\u003e Judith Wright, Train Journey\u003cbr\u003e Les Murray, Flowering Eucalypt in Autumn    \u003cbr\u003e Stanley Plumly, White Oaks Ascending\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eToward an Alphabet of Trees\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  D. H. Lawrence, Letter from Town: The Almond Tree\u003cbr\u003e Yves Bonnefoy, The Apples\u003cbr\u003e Edward Thomas, The Aspens\u003cbr\u003e A. E. Housman, Loveliest of Trees\u003cbr\u003e Basho, “From all these trees”\u003cbr\u003e Richard Eberhart, The Horse Chestnut Tree\u003cbr\u003e Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Coco-de-Mer\u003cbr\u003e Antonio Machado, To a Dried-up Elm\u003cbr\u003e Les Murray, Eucalyptus in Exile\u003cbr\u003e Gail Perez, The Fig Tree\u003cbr\u003e Howard Nemerov, Ginkgoes in Fall\u003cbr\u003e Eugenio Montale, The Lemon Trees\u003cbr\u003e John Clare, The Maple Tree\u003cbr\u003e Walt Whitman, I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing\u003cbr\u003e Shu Ting, To the Oak\u003cbr\u003e Lorentzos Mavilis, The Olive Tree\u003cbr\u003e Geoffrey Brock, The Royal Palms of South Florida\u003cbr\u003e Su Tung P’o, The Purple Peach Tree\u003cbr\u003e H. D., Pear Tree\u003cbr\u003e James Galvin, Limber Pines\u003cbr\u003e Bertolt Brecht, The Plum-Tree\u003cbr\u003e Odysseus Elytis, The Mad Pomegranate Tree\u003cbr\u003e Louis Simpson, The Redwoods\u003cbr\u003e W. C. Williams, Young Sycamore\u003cbr\u003e William Stafford, The Tulip Tree\u003cbr\u003e Denise Levertov, The Willows of Massachusetts\u003cbr\u003e William Wordsworth, Yew Trees\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003ePlanting and Preserving\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  Virgil, from \u003ci\u003eThe Georgics\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Thomas Hardy, The Pine Planters\u003cbr\u003e Giorgio Bassani, The Racial Laws\u003cbr\u003e Marianne Moore, The Camperdown Elm\u003cbr\u003e Mary Oliver, The Black Walnut Tree\u003cbr\u003e Ellen Bryant Voigt, Landscape, Dense with Trees\u003cbr\u003e Patrick Kavanagh, Beech Tree\u003cbr\u003e Seamus Heaney, Planting the Alder\u003cbr\u003e Dana Gioia, Planting a Sequoia\u003cbr\u003e Jean Giono, from \u003ci\u003eThe Man Who Planted Trees\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eGrove, Woods, Orchard, Forest\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eHomer, from \u003ci\u003eThe Odyssey\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Seamus Heaney, The Birch Grove\u003cbr\u003e Buson, “Not a leaf stirring”\u003cbr\u003e James Wright, A Small Grove in Torre del Banco\u003cbr\u003e Robert Graves, Not Dead\u003cbr\u003e Paul Valery, The Friendly Wood\u003cbr\u003e W. H. Auden, Woods\u003cbr\u003e Rainer Maria Rilke, The Apple Orchard\u003cbr\u003e H. D., Orchard  \u003cbr\u003e William Carlos Williams, Wild Orchard\u003cbr\u003e Richard Wilbur, Young Orchard\u003cbr\u003e Robert Frost, After Apple-Picking\u003cbr\u003e Yehuda Amichai, Orchard\u003cbr\u003e Edward Thomas, The Green Roads\u003cbr\u003e Yves Bonnefoy, Hopkins Forest\u003cbr\u003e Les Murray, The Gum Forest\u003cbr\u003e Robert Frost, Spring Pools \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eFrom Trees\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  Walt Whitman, Orange Buds by Mail from Florida\u003cbr\u003e Thomas Hardy, Logs on the Hearth\u003cbr\u003e William Cullen Bryant, Tree-Burial\u003cbr\u003e Robert Frost, An Encounter\u003cbr\u003e Robert Frost, The Wood-Pile\u003cbr\u003e William Carlos Williams, Burning the Christmas Greens\u003cbr\u003e James Dickey, In the Tree House at Night\u003cbr\u003e Seamus Heaney, In the Beech\u003cbr\u003e George MacBeth, To Preserve Figs\u003cbr\u003e John Haines, The Tree That Became a House\u003cbr\u003e Gary Snyder, Pine Needles\u003cbr\u003e Stanley Plumly, The Tree\u003cbr\u003e Jorie Graham, Tree Surgeons\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eGladness Gone\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  From the Book of Joel 1:11-12\u003cbr\u003e William Cowper, The Poplar-Field\u003cbr\u003e Thomas Hardy, Throwing a Tree\u003cbr\u003e Henry David Thoreau, from \u003ci\u003eJournal\u003c\/i\u003e, December 30, 1851\u003cbr\u003e Gerard Manley Hopkins, Binsey Poplars\u003cbr\u003e Ciaran Carson, At Binsey\u003cbr\u003e Vasko Popa, The Poplar and the Passer-by\u003cbr\u003e Charlotte Mew, The Trees Are Down\u003cbr\u003e Seamus Heaney, Clearances, VIII\u003cbr\u003e John Clare, To a Fallen Elm\u003cbr\u003e C. K. Williams, Elms\u003cbr\u003e Stanley Plumly, Panegyric for the Plane Tree Fallen on Fifth Avenue\u003cbr\u003e Pablo Neruda, Ode to a Fallen Chestnut\u003cbr\u003e Anonymous, Lament for the Woodlands\u003cbr\u003e Louise Erdrich, I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move\u003cbr\u003e Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, “Still pressing through these weeping solitudes”\u003cbr\u003e Stanley Kunitz, The War Against the Trees\u003cbr\u003e John Bight, Mangroves\u003cbr\u003e Nancy Willard, When There Were Trees\u003cbr\u003e Gary Snyder, “The groves are down”\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eLyrics, Meditations\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  D. H. Lawrence, Trees in the Garden\u003cbr\u003e Robert Frost, Birches\u003cbr\u003e Judith Wright, The Cedars\u003cbr\u003e Alan Dugan, On Trees\u003cbr\u003e John Ashbery, Some Trees\u003cbr\u003e Robert Frost, Tree at My Window\u003cbr\u003e Jules Supervielle, Suppose No Tree Stood Near My Window\u003cbr\u003e Paul Zimmer, Winter Trees\u003cbr\u003e Czeslaw Milosz, Into the Tree\u003cbr\u003e D. H. Lawrence, Under the Oak\u003cbr\u003e Lee Gerlach, Ghazal\u003cbr\u003e Marvin Bell, These Green-Going-to-Yellow\u003cbr\u003e James Merrill, Christmas Tree\u003cbr\u003e Howard Nemerov, Leaving the Trees\u003cbr\u003e W. D. Snodgrass, An Elm Tree\u003cbr\u003e Michael Collier, My Father as a Maple Tree\u003cbr\u003e William Meredith, Tree Marriage\u003cbr\u003e Gerald Stern, The Cemetery of Orange Trees in Crete\u003cbr\u003e Denise Levertov, In California during the Gulf War\u003cbr\u003e Vladimir Souloukhin, Willow\u003cbr\u003e Zbigniew Herbert, Sequoia\u003cbr\u003e Jim Powell, Sempervirens in Winter\u003cbr\u003e Philip Larkin, The Trees\u003cbr\u003e James Wright, To a Blossoming Pear Tree\u003cbr\u003e William Carlos Williams, The Widow’s Lament in Springtime\u003cbr\u003e David Ferry, Everybody’s TreeHARRY THOMAS is the editor of \u003ci\u003eSelected Poems of Thomas Hardy\u003c\/i\u003e (Penguin, 1993) and \u003ci\u003eMontale in English\u003c\/i\u003e (Penguin, 2002). His poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in dozens of magazines. He is editor in chief of Handsel Books, an imprint of Other Press and an affiliate of W. W. Norton.PREFACE by Stanley Plumly\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Harry Thomas has arranged his anthology of tree poems as much around complex attitudes toward trees as dramatic evocations of their arboreal being: ranging from the ‘‘gladness’’ of the fact of them to their natural, named, and significant presences to – sadly but beautifully – their ‘‘gladness gone.’’ Which is to say Thomas’ selection is emotional as well as analytical, political as well as philosophical, as it moves from celebration to meditation, from the reality and imagination of what trees are to a deepening awareness of what their loss means. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The range of poets is equally rich in variety, nationality, and history. Though the overall emphasis may be Anglo-American and the living moment especially contemporaneous, the individual poems develop in perspective from Homer’s\u003ci\u003e Odyssey\u003c\/i\u003e and Virgil’s \u003ci\u003eGeorgics\u003c\/i\u003e to examples from Matsuo Basho, and Yosa Buson to any number of international figures such as Eugenio Montale, Czeslaw Milosz, Bertolt Brecht, Giorgio Bassani and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, in first-rate translations by Lee Gerlach, Robert Hass, Edwin Morgan, Jamie McKendrick and Paul Muldoon. Indeed, ‘‘From all these trees,\/in the salads, the soup, everywhere,\/cherry blossoms fall’’ – writes the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho in the Hass version.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The mixture of tradition, innovation, and generation is as exciting as it is informing. You cannot assemble a tree anthology of poems without such classics as Wordsworth’s ‘‘Nutting’’ or Housman’s ‘‘Loveliest of Trees’’ or Whitman’s ‘‘I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing’’ or Marianne Moore’s ‘‘The Camperdown Elm.’’ You cannot test the quality of the originality of the poetry without Montale’s ‘‘The Lemon Trees’’ or Seamus Heaney’s ‘‘The Birch Grove’’ or Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘‘The Apple Orchard’’ (translated by Seamus Heaney.) You cannot include the present without pairing such poems as Mary Oliver’s ‘‘The Black Walnut Tree’’ with Ellen Bryant Voigt’s ‘‘Landscape, Dense with Trees’ or Judith Wright’s lyrical ‘‘Train Journey’’ with her massive meditation ‘‘The Cedars’’ or James Wright’s elegiac ‘‘To a Blossoming Pear Tree’’ with Marvin Bell’s lovely lament ‘‘These-Green-Going-to- Yellow.’’\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In terms of tone and poetic temperament, Thomas has effectively exercised his editorial rights to choices that are not only carefully crafted but open-ended in form and ambition; he values discipline and understatement but at the same time admires ‘‘tree’’ poems that think with their hearts, that enlarge the view with vision. David Ferry’s ‘‘Everybody’s Tree’’ is just that kind of contemporary visionary poem that at some one hundred associative, narrative lines, structured in moments like paragraphs, develops around both personal history and the larger caring time of local community, in a voice at once filled with losses and empathy for those losses. And no poet could be more empathic and expansive than Keats-contemporary John Clare in his ‘‘sweetest anthem’’ ‘‘To a Fallen Elm’’ – its wide, searching lines of direct address may come close to anger but they also abide with love.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e There is so much to admire here in this beautifully focused gathering of poems, both in the familiar and as discovery. Some of my own favorites are Wordsworth’s ‘‘Yew Trees,’’ W. C. Williams’ ‘‘Burning the Christmas Greens,’’ Jorie Graham’s ‘‘Tree Surgeons,’’ Robert Graves’s ‘‘Not Dead,’’ Gerald Stern’s ‘‘The Cemetery of Orange Trees in Crete,’’ James Dickey’s ‘‘In the Tree House at Night,’’ and on and on. Because Thomas has arranged his selections around centers of both generosity and gravity he never loses sight of the essential thing: that trees are the great flowers of our world – life-givers, life-enhancers, life-poetry. They literally stand at the line between life and death. How many kinds of trees are there, how many purposes, how many differences among the domestic and the wild, the old growth and the new, the abrupt edges and the farmer’s field?\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e We love trees for a reason, we cut them down for other reasons, we kill them at our peril. The Ojebway believe that cutting down living trees is like the wounding and killing of animals. The pointless downing of trees is probably worse. For many decades my family’s business was the harvesting of trees, a business that would often take my father and his crews out into the Shenandoah for days at a time. This was in the Forties, during and after the war. As a small boy I’d sometimes go out with the men for a couple of days, if for nothing else than the feeling of being among the looming hardwoods – the big white oaks and scarlet and silver maples and shagbark hickories and massive black walnuts. Just to try to look straight up among them would be to lose your balance, yet their very presences changed the sky and lifted it all somehow.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The man-made cutting and trimming was one thing. The other was the natural competition for sunlight and rain and space among the trees themselves, so that there was an inevitable wear and tear and rot and fall that would leave the forest floor covered with ruins, all mixed up in layers of branch and root and debris. Such places in the woods always struck me as sad yet also sacred places, since, when I was old enough to really think about it, they were in-between places where the trees had decided the difference between the past and the future.","brand":"Everyman's Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301623353573,"sku":"NP9781101908150","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781101908150.jpg?v=1767734909","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/poems-about-trees-isbn-9781101908150","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}