100 books like The Trees Witness Everything

Saigyo (1118-1190) was one of the most influential Japanese poets. His name means "Westward Journey" which implies moving toward the Pure Land of Amitabha Buddha. The poems bring out the bitter-sweet quality of life, beauty and loneliness, blooming spring and frosty winter, cherry petals and tears that fall, echoing the deep emotionality and mystery of the spirit of Japanese Buddhism.

Bashō’s poetic narrative of a journey he made in 1689 to northeastern Honshū is the most famous travelogue in Japanese literature. As a college student in 1970, I read a translation and imagined someday following the path of his journey to see what he saw. Over three decades later, I had the time, resources, and knowledge to make several road trips to do just that. After reading various translations, I found Sato’s the most helpful in understanding why Bashō visited the places he did and what his narrative and poems were about. As we drove along Bashō’s roads, Sato’s annotated text provided insights into the history and culture of Japan and its Tōhoku region. 

Sorrow is plural but grief is singular writes American poet, Victoria Chang, in her latest book Obit.

To me, this phrase resonates all the more powerfully as we find ourselves emerging from the Covid pandemic and assessing the impact it had on us. We were united, around the world, in our sorrow but the way we grieved was unique to each one of us.

This long poem, written after the death of her mother, is an elegy to grief itself. Taken from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the epigraph at the beginning of the book reads: give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak. This is exactly what the writer has done. 

In the Restoration and the eighteenth century, the mark of a true poet was to see things—to describe the visible and invisible worlds so vividly that everyone could see them too. 

Most modern readers are blind to this. But Jean Hagstrum teaches us how to see with eighteenth-century eyes. The pictures that poets make, and the paintings that inspire those visions, come alive in thoughtful readings that focus on the workshops of art: the schools where artists learn the craft of making what is imagined into something that seems real.

Shara Lessley and I met in Amman, Jordan, during the Arab Spring—both of us American writers whose husbands worked at the embassy. Poetry is not a staple of my reading diet, but Lessley’s poems are small, crystalline stories that perfectly encapsulate what it is like to be an American woman living in the Middle East during a time of potential instability. This volume is slim, but the Jordan that emerges is vast and unforgettable.

Kelly Norman Ellis is the Chairperson for the Department of English, Foreign Languages, and Literatures at Chicago State University. And like those who have made the “Great Migration” before her, she too has taken the South with her in this wonderful debut collection of poetry. In this book, she deftly taps into the Blues ethos to conjure vivid imagery of a Mississippi unique with its patois, cuisine, and customs that have unmistakably shaped her worldview as an adult. It was the South that would try to degrade and dehumanize Black life. But it was the same South where family and a village would instill pride, confidence, and self-worth. This is a book of a poet coming to terms with where she has come from and celebrating the journey. It reinforces the notion that everywhere you go, home is already there.

While this book of poems, first published in 1964, does hark back to a past era, the poems themselves are timeless. There’s an underlying sense of peace, which gives me solace when I feel bleak and filled with a nameless anxiety. Despite the sorrows, there’s grace in these poems, and in the world Berry speaks of — a simpler world than the one we live in today. Yet, each time I read them, I’m enriched with comfort and hope that frees me from the melancholy of living in a modern world that appears to be losing its way.

Westlake, a poet of Native Hawaiian ancestry, incorporates influences from Chinese Taoist and Japanese haiku poetry, Dada concrete poetry, the writings of Kerouac and Bukowski, as well as local pidgin and Hawaiian literary traditions. Westlake’s editor and friend Richard Hamasaki writes that the early poems are “calm, contemplative, and serene, often playful, celebratory”—humans interacting with nature, from rain, moonlight, and mountains, to bugs, frogs, and dandelions: “Looks of disbelief: / I’m on my knees / Washing a rock.” The later poems are political: “Westlake blasts away at Waikiki’s rampant tourism and American materialism, which replaced the native culture in his native land. He wonders, “how we spose / feel Hawaiian anymoa / barefeet buying smokes / in da seven eleven stoa ...?”

This collection teaches me as well, by taking me into the experience of growing up in the Black, rural Appalachian South.

The poems are part memoir, as in writing about the experience of her mother visiting her where she lived with her grandparents, “(We) held hands like we thought/mothers & daughters should/but neither of us knew for sure.” 

They are also part love song to home-cooking, “Every morning of my childhood, my grandmother, who stood a little/ under five feet tall, donned an apron and cooked breakfast. Slow. Precise./ Deliberate. She equated food with love, and she cooked with both a fury/ and a quiet joy.” 

And finally, they are part Black feminist manifesto, “My black body is a boulder, a stop sign. Sometimes i think my body is/ graceful, a song of freedom. Sometimes i think it is something that every/ eye casts away. I must concentrate if i… show more.

This book is simply the first written story ever found—and it’s about friendship! It was pressed into clay in the city of Nineveh around four thousand years ago and was re-found in the nineteenth century. It tells the story of a friendship between two men, Gilgamesh, the lord of his city, and Enkidu, ‘a wild man’ from the forests. The story recounts their adventures, then Enkidu’s death, and Gilgamesh’s grief at losing his friend. I find it extraordinary that so many thousands of years ago, human beings were concerned with the nature and power of friendship—it shows that the bonds of friendship are fundamental to human beings.