Thinking with Trees: Poems

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.