Bosk

The short poems in Bosk grow out of close encounters with trees, shrubs, and understory plants observed throughout a sprawling Boston arboretum built on glacial drumlins, with valleys and meadows threading between them. These poems emerged from slow, aimless wandering-moments when a shape, texture, or pattern tugged at the senses and asked to be noticed. From those encounters came a series of questions: How does careful attention to nonhuman beings both distort and sharpen our perception? How might deep observation rekindle our connection to place, easing us out of apathy? And can brief poems spark a kind of phenomenological inquiry-playful, probing, and alive to the porous membrane between the self and the wider world?

About the Author :
Writer and translator Patrick Barron grew up in the Pacific Northwest, moving from Great Falls, Montana to Anchorage, Alaska, and then Eugene, Oregon. He spent significant years in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Ferrara, Italy, and San Francisco, and holds degrees in English and Cultural Geography. He now lives in Boston where he teaches at the University of Massachusetts. His books include Spooring (poetry); Selected Essays and Dialogues: Adventures into the Errant Familiar, by Gianni Celati; Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale; Haiku for a Season, Haiku per una stagione, by Andrea Zanzotto; The Selected Poetry and Prose of Andrea Zanzotto; and Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology. His work has received a number of recognitions, including the Rome Prize; the National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship; the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship; the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award; and a Fulbright Scholarship.

Review :

Patrick Barron's incredible Bosk conveys the arbor-ardors of speech among species. It moves inside the names we give to nature, pulling word and branch apart for careful inspection, and drawing out the secret language that connects tree to tree, and we. This is a book that reminds us we are all enmeshed in a "vagrant vacuous whole" across "fields of ever increasing paratactic parallax." -Rebecca Kosick

Each of these small poems unfolds like a Mallarmé fan-poem from within the initials of the Latin name of a bush or tree. While their exact origins are concealed until the endnotes, each dispatch from the arboretum is imbued with the spirit of its source-tree. "Knobby articulations" unfurl themselves like buds from between the prickles of crateagus crus-galli, the cockspur hawthorn. There are flutters of playful intimacy in those poems that directly address their cryptically-named trees, even stronger where "scattershot rustlings" speak back from the plant itself, as tree and human find shared voiced in "this brilliant/ sputtering state of being." -Ellen Dillon

• Patrick Barron's incredible Bosk conveys the arbor-ardors of speech among species. It moves inside the names we give to nature, pulling word and branch apart for careful inspection, and drawing out the secret language that connects tree to tree, and we. This is a book that reminds us we are all enmeshed in a "vagrant vacuous whole" across "fields of ever increasing paratactic parallax." -Rebecca Kosick

• Each of these small poems unfolds like a Mallarmé fan-poem from within the initials of the Latin name of a bush or tree. While their exact origins are concealed until the endnotes, each dispatch from the arboretum is imbued with the spirit of its source-tree. "Knobby articulations" unfurl themselves like buds from between the prickles of crateagus crus-galli, the cockspur hawthorn. There are flutters of playful intimacy in those poems that directly address their cryptically-named trees, even stronger where "scattershot rustlings" speak back from the plant itself, as tree and human find shared voiced in "this brilliant/ sputtering state of being." -Ellen Dillon