The Trees Witness Everything
Guardian Best Books of 2022
Electric Lit Favorite Poetry Collections of 2022A lover of strict form, best-selling poet Victoria Chang turns to compact Japanese waka, powerfully innovating on tradition while continuing her pursuit of one of life's hardest questions: how to let go. In The Trees Witness Everything, Victoria Chang reinvigorates language by way of concentration, using constraint to illuminate and free the wild interior. Largely composed in various Japanese syllabic forms called "wakas," each poem is shaped by pattern and count. This highly original work innovates inside the lineage of great poets including W.S. Merwin, whose poem titles are repurposed as frames and mirrors for the text, stitching past and present in complex dialogue. Chang depicts the smooth, melancholic isolation of the mind while reaching outward to name―with reverence, economy, and whimsy―the ache of wanting, the hawk and its shadow, our human urge to hide the minute beneath the light.
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"The elegant and reflective fourth collection from Chang presents a moving elegy for both her deceased mother and the dying Earth, using form to capture the fleeting nature of life. . . . The poems seem like fragments of enlightenment collectively working toward a revelation. . . . For those who are grieving and those who have grieved, Chang offers beautiful insights, and a path toward healing."--Publishers Weekly
"From Victoria Chang, who grabbed attention with her recent OBIT, The Trees Witness Everything uses Japanese syllabic forms called wakas to plumb our rich interior lives."--Library Journal
"The poems in The Trees Witness Everything are not necessarily meant to be distinct, in that together they enforce a practice, a timescale, in which each poem contributes. . . to writing as always an epistemological experiment."--Los Angeles Review of Books
"Chang follows Obit (2020) with a new collection in four sublime parts. At the start, Chang works with a traditional Japanese form, waka, also known as tanka, or short poem, and adroitly uses titles of poems by W. S. Merwin as prompts, creating astonishingly subtle poems that gracefully bloom. In 'The String, ' she writes, 'When the earth rotates, / a person not tied down with / longing falls off into space.' The book's second section is 'Marfa, Texas, ' a long poem sculpted out of reflection on that enigmatic art mecca in the West Texas desert. Lines pop out: 'Here, / you can pay someone to clip / off your shadow and walk it / across the border.' Or 'Here, / when I cry in my head, my / tears come out as letters.' The poet's dialog with Merwin continues in part three, 'The Shipwreck, ' as she offers 'I sit at my desk. / Desire is an anchor-- / I lift it and words come up.' Wildness is alive throughout in birds--hawks, crows, and wounded larks--along with crickets and beetles that appear between sentences. 'Love Letters' closes this enlightened collection, which reads as an amalgam of bu
