Indeed, much of this book’s pleasure is in the patience with which it makes contact with the political. Why would this surprise us? Every interest need not have such immediate, political application. So there’s something special about finding these lines here, years later, and to be reminded that, despite her commitment to witnessing and writing the injustices around her, Wright still tended to her beech appreciation. The later years of Wright’s career saw her travelling throughout South America, as a book like Rising, Falling, Hovering will show, shot through as it is with scenes of political upheaval, violence, and war-torn city streets. Anything can happen.” In other places, as if to feel out an excursive conversation through other means, the prose breaks into skinny, columnar lines: We can watch Wright find her music, how we move from the more straightforward “warmer winters aren’t good for beeches” to the adjusted, nearly trochaic “warmer winters are upon us.” At the same time, Wright’s sentences are taut, sometimes playfully so: “Trees live long lives. In an effort to put the hard brakes on their weight. Photographs show the Maine bears leaving puncture marks going up the trees, and parallel marks coming down

(Polar vortex notwithstanding.) In Maine the beeches soldier on in spite of the bark-feeding scale whose populations explode with the warmer winters,īut they don’t produce much mast for the bears. Wright’s prose is easy on the ear, not unserious but also not afraid to be funny, and lightened by a kind of confidence you find, one might assume, after decades of writing without subscribing to any particular school: “Obsession” might be the right word, though that sounds too fatalistic, which this book is not, and undermines the ambulatory course through science, history, photography, and family this book makes. At its core, the book is an extensively researched examination, meditation, or love letter to the beech tree. What we have in Casting, then, is more like an artifact of imagination, the poet immersed in her fieldwork.

While the book offers us technically no closure per se, its openness is not out of step with the mode of investigation on display that is, of following one’s nose, watching what connections take hold. Add to this list of works the posthumously published and no less ambitious Casting Deep Shade, recently released from Copper Canyon Press. At the same time, the particularity of place she’d rendered even in her earliest poems were felt, to the end of her career, through an inimitable style. The trajectory of work she left us with is just that: a trajectory, its forward momentum felt in her insistence on enlarging her scope, each book seeming to attain higher ground than its predecessor. Wright passed away at the beginning of 2016. Wright’s Casting Deep Shade - by Ben Rutherfurd

Cd wright casting deep shade