among the oaksmy skin is a type of barkI give birth to rocksthe same thing that happensto me happens to thema leaf will flutter downmy roots and into another worldturning to ghostscreeping back as the light goes lowI am painted dancers sproutingfrom the vinesthe strings of my body vibrateto the strings of the rain
Among the Great Oaks in Autumn
Jason Allen-Paisant
Feature Date
- December 12, 2021
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“Among the Great Oaks in Autumn” from THINKING WITH TREES: by Jason Allen-Paisant.
Published by Carcanet Press August 26th, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by Jason Allen-Paisant.
Reprinted by kind permission of Carcanet Press, Manchester, UK.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican poet and essayist whose work explores issues at the intersection of landscape, time, history, and the Black body. His most recent works reflect on the complex meanings of nature in Black life. His collection, Thinking with Trees (Carcanet Press, 2021) has been described as ‘an expansive, fracturing, subversive book’ (The Irish Times). His poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in Granta, The Guardian, The Poetry Review, Callaloo, PN Review, Prospections, The BBC, and other venues, and has been the recipient of a prestigious Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Jason holds a Doctorate in Medieval and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford and now works as a Lecturer in Poetry and Decolonial Thought at the University of Leeds. He is currently developing a nonfiction book entitled Primitive Child: On Blackness, Landscape, and Reclaiming Time.
"As he cuts a radical response to the pastoral in a Leeds forest where dogs are welcomed but black men are suspect, he echoes June Jordan's 40-year-old question, 'suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/ or far into the woods I wanted to go?'"
—Martina Evans, Irish Times Best Books of the Year 2021
"To hear this new sound, one is invited to cross the threshold into something "accidental / so entire so free", away from an exclusive lyric past and beyond the inherited traumas of slave labour. This crossing, the speaker of poems like 'Black Walking' informs us, is not only a physical passage but a leap over the precipice of racial asymmetry."
—Mantra Mukim, The Poetry Review
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