Trees are Masters of the Space

This book is about a scrap of woods, creek and fields, thirty-four acres in Saugatuck Township, Michigan, and especially celebrates its trees: oaks, maples, hemlocks, pawpaws.

For Jim Hanson, this land is not only the place he lives, and where he runs every morning while constructing lines of verse in his head, but also a functioning natural environment, a space the trees command yet again after being clearcut in the nineteenth century, and a homestead his family has lived on for generations.

It's a poem made up of lyric and narrative sections that cycle through the seasons celebrating the land's archaeology, history, ecology and geography, and the arrowheads, the bottles, the books, the lilacs, a silo and even the rusty remains of a long-abandoned car that remind us how it must have appeared in the past to an array of characters, from hunters a thousand years ago to a farmer a hundred years ago struggling to make a living on sandy, unrewarding soil.

All poetry is local, as it should be, and this poem lovingly embraces the family's local habitat and heritage. It's like a big hug to the poet's surroundings.