TreeTalk, Ariel Gordon
At Bay Press,
2020
The premise behind this collection was that Ariel Gordon spent the weekend of July 29-30, 2017, on The Tallest Poppy’s patio in Winnipeg. She sat under a boulevard elm and wrote poems that would be woven into the elm’s canopy of leaves. During that time, she invited people who passed by to join her in writing poems on pieces of paper that had been cut from file folders. Their poems were added to the tree, as well. This was a collaborative project that was part of a Synonym Arts Consultation residency. I love this notion, of inviting people in a community who may not consider themselves to be ‘poetic’ to enter into a conversation with the natural world through poetry. Here, then, is a living and holistic collaboration between tree, poet, and community. Here, then, are confidential notes written to the tree by ‘strangers’—confessions, secrets, and diary entries of people’s truest thoughts and emotions.
Scattered throughout the collection are tiny excerpts of field notes about trees. These are factual pieces of information, almost little counterparts to the more intimate vignettes that are woven through the book. We learn from Donald Culross Peattie, in a quotation taken from A Natural History of North American Trees that, amazingly, “A big old specimen will have about 1 million leaves or an acre of leaf surface, and will cast a pool of shade 100 feet in diameter.” From Plants of the Western Boreal Forest & Aspen Parkland, we learn that the elm is “one of our finest shade trees, widely used as an ornamental tree in cities and rural areas across much of Canada.” From the same source, too, we learn of Dutch Elm Disease, and how it is “caused by the wilt fungus and spread by elm bark beetles.” Since its arrival in North America in 1930, and in Manitoba in 1975, “many trees have died.” These factual pieces are like anchors of sorts, letting the reader learn about how elms work and live.
A series of raw confessions and secrets ribbon themselves through the collection. Someone writes “I fear never meeting the love of my life,” while another one scrawls “I used to think there was such a thing as an acorn tree. Until I was 27.” Yet another writes “I like to think about the things you must have/seen…” Gordon encourages passersby, writing: “People, if anyone can keep a secret, it’s a tree. Because trees don’t talk back. CONFESS!” A poignant part of TreeTalk is the sense of trust that people have, in telling the tree their deepest fears and secrets. They reveal their humanity in their notes, all of which Gordon will have hung from the oak itself over the course of that one weekend in July 2017. In doing so, she has woven human to tree, and then simultaneously woven tree to human, too.
Layered into the work, of course, is the beauty of Ariel Gordon’s own poetry. Her love of trees, of the environment, and of asking us to be mindful of both as we live in urban and rural places, is clear and passionate. Her voice, as a poet, is tender and mindful. She writes, “How do you talk to a tree?/With sentences as broad as a year? Sudden/storms of words./Squirrels as punctuation.” She says, with certainty, “I am shaded, cooled./I am canopied, in good/company. I am treed.” The way the poems move across the pages, too, is evocative of the way in which the poet hopes to offer space for the reader to stop and take a breath, to let the poetry of the words settle into their soul. The poems are like leaves shifting in the breeze.
In a pandemic year when most Canadians have found great solace in the natural world, in being outside as often as possible, Gordon’s collection comes at the most appropriate time. It’s an anchor in an uncertain world, a bit of solace. She also reminds us that we need to think of what trees mean, as they are guardians of time and place. Trees mark our own history as humans, have seen things we haven’t seen. By the time a person finishes reading TreeTalk, they will be well and truly ‘treed.’
