Keynote
A visionary new collection by former poet laureate of the United States and winner of the Pulitzer Prize Tracy K. Smith
Book Title
The Forest
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
Poem Excerpt
My children, my forest—I am afraid to tell you—
but must—about the men—once saplings them-
selves—who have gone off looking for axes. They
will be back soon—and oh, my children—they, too,
reject the distinction between children and trees.
—from “[The children of trees]”
Body
The forest in Tracy K. Smith’s brilliant new work is and is not a metaphor. While these poems strive to hear and to heed the voices of the earth and its nations of trees, they also test a discomfiting view of humanity, not as divided and opposing factions but as a vast cacophonous family connected by a single deep root.
The Forest grapples with violence, cynicism, and injustice by tapping into the ecstatic for much-needed insight, humility, and conviction. Enlivened by slow time and spiritual desire, Smith’s poems are political and devotional conduits that bear witness to meditative visions and channeled conversations with ancestors and ascended guides. Several poems honor motherhood and the particular care bound up in mothering Black sons. Others come to terms with grief and a failed marriage now so distant as to be another life. Hovering always near, the divine feminine is a figure called forth to refute the God of War.
The Forest is a magnificent act of foresight beyond the granular realities of partisan depravity, polarization, and indifference. Smith reaches an exhilarating new height, in contact with the mythic and the rapturous.
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