She spoke to and for trees, and the creatures that owe their well being to arboreal health. a walking, talking profligate.” If she was, as we all are, profligate, she was also prophet. In a passage where she acknowledges she had not been able yet to read Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, Wright notes “I sit here eating ‘carefully watched over’ cashews grown in India, from one of the 102 billion plastic bags used annually in the US, wearing a linen shirt (albeit secondhand) made in China, jeans fabrique en Haiti, Delta Blues Museum T-shirt made in Honduras. One of the gifts of her imagination is the insight of implication. Wright compels us to see the trees that once comprised a forest. Sebald invited readers to journey through the haunted house of history, where the terrors of the Holocaust and colonialism coexisted with the delights of gardening, couture, and cuisine. Sebald, whose inclusion of photographs and ephemera alongside his text made for an experience that was more than reading. The aesthetic qualities of the book recall the work of W.G. Wright’s fascination with beech trees has yielded a book that contains multitudes. Like Walden, Casting Deep Shade emerges from a combined commitment to ethics and ecology, and recognizes that love of nature cannot be separated from love of justice. Now readers can dwell in Casting Deep Shade, a book that is also an arboretum.
Shallcross, the first of Wright’s collections to appear after her sudden death in 2016, mixed short lyric poems with a longer sequence dedicated to murder victims in New Orleans. Wright’s ear was as open as her heart, keen to set down calamities private and public, gathering the moments and manners of particular lives while also investigating larger patterns such as the US Civil Rights movement and the current carceral state. In book-length poetry projects such as One With Others and One Big Self, she patented a style that borrowed from the documentary techniques of Muriel Rukeyser and brimmed with luscious description as well as lustrous bits of vernacular. This is the beginning of ceremony.” She asks what the effect would be if national parks “became places of conscience instead of places of consumption?” In recent decades there have been few poets more conscientious than C. In her book The Hour of Land, Terry Tempest Williams writes, “If we can learn to listen to the land, we can learn to listen to each other.
Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2019.
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