Thinking with Trees

Rezensionen / Stimmen

'Allen-Paisant is uncompromising when digging down through the undergrowth of our imperialist past - and yet he succeeds in replanting new narratives in the same soil where these toxic ideologies used to, and still, reside.'

Maryam Hessavi, Poetry London 'These observant poems lay their burdens down by the rivers of Babylon and try to sing the Lord's song in a strange land. What might it mean for the black body to experience nature, not as labour, but as leisure? What might it mean to simply walk through a park and observe the birds and the trees? The poems are beautiful and gentle, but the questions they raise are difficult and important.'

Kei Miller 'Allen-Paisant's poetic ruminations deceptively radicalise Wordsworth's pastoral scenic daffodils; here the body is never restful or relaxed due to a lingering unease in these British parks and woodlands. He employs the usual meditative tropes found in nature writing, in order to exploit and amplify the psychological sense of entitlement this relationship with the land denotes. These penetrable lyrical verses and essays deconstruct democratic notions of green space in the British landscape by racialising contemporary ecological poetics. The collection's power lies in Allen-Paisant's subtle destabilization of the ordinary dog walker's right to space, territory, property and leisure by positioning the colonised Black male body's complicated and unsafe reality in these spaces.'

Malika Booker 'Jason Allen-Paisant maps a complex and multifaceted internal landscape in these astounding poems. How does the person occupy a poem? How does the poem speak back to a person? How does a poem then speak to the world?... Tough queries on language and personhood are posed through Paisant's extraordinary line and sense of image; every poem seems a painting with their flashes of colour, their broad scope of place, the vivid characters of the people and animals who inhabit them. In these quietly subversive lyrics, expectations are undone, of ecologies, of people, of poems: trees, dogs, thoughts, cells, the daily world here is rendered wholly new.'

Rachael Allen 'Jason Allen-Paisant deftly inscribes his own signature on worlds inner and outer in these gorgeous poems. The future of Caribbean lyric poetry is in great hands'

Lorna Goodison 'Allen-Paisant has penned a debut that may be years ahead of its time.'

Anthony Anaxagorou 'The poet scrupulously decouples nature from any sense of private ownership, opening himself up to more generous, alternative worldviews. This is a bold and impressive debut.'

David Wheatley, Guardian Review Roundup 'A remarkable work... It's a stunning debut collection'

Richard Price & Sally Price, 'Bookshelf 2021', New West Indian Guide 'The power of this expansive, original book is in its attention to the ways in which a sense of leisure, territory and belonging is an implicit, racialised underpinning in the long tradition of nature writing ... Thinking with Trees is an expansive, fracturing, subversive book.'

Sean Hewitt, The Irish Times '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 'Thinking with Trees has a narrative arc - it reads like a walking diary, though not signposted as such or always in order through the seasons.'

Fiona Moore, The Friday Poem '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 'This is a collection that engages with the fluidity of form and rhythm, the poems spread out on the page like roots and leaves... this is a collection that moves the conversation into something much deeper, much richer, more contemplative and more pressing'

SK Grout, The Alchemy Spoon 'Original, masterful, and beautiful ... invites us to think about a perpetual condition of 'marronage' for the Caribbean writer.'

Bocas 2022 Prize Judges, where Thinking with Trees was shortlisted