The Trees Around
Chris Tonelli
Full of the will and the weather, that great skeptic Wallace Stevens walked to work and wrote his poems, poems you may well already love and believe. (Good, as they say, for you.) And as for Chris Tonelli, he walks in that integrity: read him, and be merciful unto yourself. His foot standeth in an even place. This book'll make you bloom.
Graham Foust
What People Are Saying
Bill Knott
Chris Tonelli has to be one of the best young poets in the USA. The Trees Around is great— a singularly-gifted synthesis of intelligence and visual depictive skill. I'd do the usual blurb-bit of quoting some apt phrase from it in summary, but there are too many good ones to choose from. It's filled with pleasing aspects. The book is brilliant and deserves the highest praise.
Ana Božičević
In The Trees Around, the poet-watcher delights in the dismantling motion of his eye and yearns to be released into the seen. The book vibrates white-noise silence, welling as an ancient lyricism like that of Li Po sitting with the mountain until only the mountain remains: “I was born/ without dreams; that's the/ first step./ Then,/ to gather no material." These poems are that fierce resonance “between the mask and face," the “elusive reunion" their watcher reaches for.
Inside the Book
- Category:
- Poetry
- Binding:
- Perfect-bound. 80 pp,
- Dimensions
- 8.8" x 5.9"
- Publication Date:
- April 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780982617704
Reviews
- Erika Moya
- Matt Mullins
- Matthew Falk
From the Book
Why Poems Can Be More Like Paintings
The present murders us for the past
having barely grazed the word.The word—a seagull, high against
the overcast sky, winkinglike a fake moustache. It thinks
the factory is the sea. A river-bed: great depths to receive, great
depths to give away. To the ocean.
Elegy W/Juniper
— for George Mazzoni
There is a place
I can't get to
because he is dead.
I want to live at
the ocean because
he did. I will go to
his town even, his
house. But what
will I go there to
receive? The junipers
unpruned? We think
of trees as places
and as defining
places. I had never
thought of him as
defining a place.
Maybe people should
have been trees.