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
The tree, real enough, was probably not big enough at the time to provide shade for the idle, bookish type.Ī copper beech is planted in front of his seated statue in Louisville, where with bronze book balanced on his knee, pried open by a bronze finger, he watches the Ohio roll on, where he first saw slaves unloaded, and was put wise to his revulsion toward the peculiar institution.A Review of C.D. This is where he rode Old Bob, grey shawl over his own grey shoulders, and though usually accompanied by a cavalry detail, did once have his high hat shot through. This is where Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation, and the kids could play mumble-the-whatever-the-hell-it-is-peg. Though Lincoln was known to have enjoyed reading under a beech, it is apparently not true that he and his son Tad played and read under a copper beech at the cottage on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home. For all we know he may have liked to look at dirty flip books under the ample canopy of a solitary beech. Home in Illinois, Lincoln liked to read under a beech.
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