The 2019 Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction and poetry – two of the most distinguished literary awards in the United States – both posed the same question: What is the role of trees in human experience?
The poet Forrest Gander (awarded a Pulitzer for his elegiac collection Be With) illustrates what some have called “ecopoetry.” His work is faithful to his dual education in literature and in geology. He explores the landscape, focusing on our belonging to the earth and plant world. “There, in the rumpled quiet of the trees, we catch the most animate qualities. In the riffle of leafy detail, we sense the respiration of the forest.” And we also feel our breath in the reading of the words delicately cadenced.