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Description
From "The Afterlife of Trees"
/Neither sheep nor cows crisscross our lives as much./Trees dangle apples and nuts for the hungry, throw/shade down for lovers, mark sites for the lost,/and first and last are/utterly themselves,/fuller and finer than any letter or number,/any 7 or T. Their fragmentary afterlife goes on/in a guitar's body and a hockey stick, in the beaked faces/up a totem pole and the stake through a vampire's heart,/in a fragrant cheese-board, a Welsh love-spoon,/a sweat-stained axe handle, a giant green dragonfly suspended from the ceiling with twine,/in the spellbinding shapechanging/behind a glass woodstove-door...
Editorial Review
On The Afterlife of Trees: "Trees are ‘utterly themselves,' Brian Bartlett writes in the title poem of The Afterlife of Trees, and the same could be said of the poet himself, whose textured, learned poems are full of keen observation and deep reverence for the natural world. ‘The star-jammed / blackness nearly threw me on my back,' he says in another poem. It is a great pleasure to see that sky, and the world beneath it, through Bartlett's eyes." Carole Glasser Langille, author of In Cannon Cave -----
On Granite Erratics: "For a number of years, and without fanfare, Brian Bartlett has been quietly providing us with some of our best poetry ... No series of review quotations can do justice to the density and nuance, the lush foliation of Bartlett's diction ... This is poetry that is thick and suggestive; its rhythm both subtle and sinewy." Ross Leckie, author of The Authority of Roses -----
"Bartlett's poetry has granite strength and texture and something of an ammonite about it - a sense of connection with history and continuity. There is a tenderness to his poems too which makes them very moving. I find them a constant delight." Barbara Colebrook Peace, author of Kyrie
