According to Henry David Thoreau, in his famous lecture “Walking,” the verb “saunter” derives from the French “Sainte-Terre” and refers to vagrants in the Middle Ages who wandered about ostensibly in search of the Holy Land. Alternatively, it might derive from sans terre, meaning without land or home, or having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. In his meditative, stream-of-consciousness poetry collection Thinking with Trees (the U.S. edition of which is forthcoming this September from Milkweed Editions), Jason Allen-Paisant approaches the idea of walking from a similar perspective as Thoreau. The author, who grew up in Jamaica but now is a professor at the University of Manchester, wrestles with a feeling of homelessness, struggles to belong, and searches for the sacred through nature. The poet walks through both time and place: changing seasons, childhood memories and adulthood realities, the span of centuries, and the watery barrier of the Atlantic Ocean. On the way, he inquires into what a walk really is, who is allowed to take walks, and how our approach to walking shapes our view of nature.
Walking as a pastime took off in the Victorian era, during which Thoreau wrote his lecture. Instead of moving the body as a part of daily work, sedentary upper-class people had to implement purposeful movement. This perception of walking remains with us today. A 2022 study from the National Center for Health Statistics reported that 58.7% of US adults walk for leisure as opposed to 16.2% which walked solely for transportation. Health benefits aside, writers throughout history have found walking beneficial to the creative process. William Wordsworth’s friend Thomas De Quincey estimated that the poet must have walked between 175,000 and 180,000 English miles. Researchers Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz at Stanford University found in a 2014 study that “walking opens up the free flow of ideas” and “walking outside produced the most novel and highest-quality analogies.” This had been recognized since ancient times. In Phaedrus, Socrates suggests a walk along the river to stimulate intellectual conversation. The Peripatetic school of philosophers, started by Aristotle, received its name from their custom of walking while lecturing. The very title of the book “Thinking with Trees” acknowledges this impact that walking in nature has on the thought process. Recalling that paper itself originates from wood pulp deepens the pun.
In the first poem, “Crossing the Threshold,” Allen-Paisant announces his beginning: “I am walking / I am not going.” This first stanza sets up the tension which is explored throughout the book — the idea that walking doesn’t require attaining any purpose outside of itself. He begins with a mental stroll through boyhood memories of Jamaican place-names: Banana Ground, Dam Head, Coffee Grove. They are described with loving vividness: “brown leaves so alive,” an “ivy floor” that “gives off / murmured laughs.” The speaker expresses an intimate kinship with this landscape: “I have space for you in / my blood.” It is a landscape which both provides his place in the world and influences his self-conception.
This is not the way the poet feels in England. Feeling an urge “to connect with this land,” he finds he does not know the names of the local birds or plants. Wanting to give them names, he discovers “everything is already / named.” For him, this lack of language to describe the world is the first displacement. Language is an expression of both culture and placehood. To lack vocabulary for something is to be unable to comprehend it or relate to it. Back in Jamaica, daily life required knowledge of the living world, through planting crops and “shaping the land.” It was a “landscape within [him],” not “scenery / spread out on a canvas.”
This is the first criticism Allen-Paisant has for walking. Walking purely for leisure or enjoyment leads to a separation from the landscape. It imposes the self upon it, and implies a typological distance between humans and nature. Reflecting on his baby daughter’s future, the poet muses that “for her a wood will not be / burned for fire”. That is, it will not serve a practical purpose in her life. In his hometown in Porus, Jamaica,
The wood land was there
not for living in going for walks
or thinking
Trees were answers to our needs
not objects of desire
In England, he finds that he must “practis[e] a different way / of being with the woods.” He must enjoy it for its pleasant scenery instead of deriving his livelihood from it. This way of being in the woods does not come without a psychological cost. Throughout the poet’s woodland walks lurks the ominous.
In “Rhododendrons”, he describes the bushes as full of snakes “fighting in a primordial dance,” bringing to mind the Garden of Eden, where even in paradise danger skulked in serpentine form.
However, the danger in the woods is most often symbolized by dogs and their owners: “muscle boys with pit bulls / and knives.” In “But What Are These Woods Anyway,” the poet recounts his fear when some dogs escape the control of their owners and rush over to him. He feels “their breath on [his] calves.” One of the owners apologizes, excusing the dog as “only a puppy.” But the poet is haunted by that encounter. Similar events reoccur in the book, repeated to the point of being heavy-handed, as if the poet doesn’t trust us to understand the point. The speaker is terrified of dogs, and their ubiquitous presence on his walks reminds him of their association with slavery. “History keeps following me around,” he says in the opening poem, and as these themes develop it becomes clear he is, at least in part, referring to the “dog on the plantation…mauling…the Black body” with a “violence that made / White life possible”.
The poet’s discomfort with dogs also arrives from his perception of dogs as valued more than other humans. “I’m troubled by this normalcy,” he writes, “in which the dog / gets everything it wants”. The dogs are “owned objects”, like enslaved people once were, but they are spoiled and treated like “babies”. Many people go on walks because of their dogs. Their presence makes the poet feel unsafe and unwelcome in these spaces. He believes that “to go walking in these woods is to face / a different idea of what human is”. On these walks, people do not really see you — they go past you, avoiding eye contact, passing “without touching.”
Later in his essay, Thoreau writes,“If you…are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.” This is a theme the speaker highlights in his sequence of poems on leisure. Walking as leisure was foreign to his upbringing, something he struggles to accept for himself. Even in Jamaica, he felt there was “a wall” separating him from the woods. Descended from people whose “bodies were property,” the poet grew up with an awareness that “to occupy space is to occupy time…Time is never to be wasted…Your life is marked by doing, working.” While he battles with the idea that that leisure time is for him, he has to consciously give himself permission to go on walks, to speak up for himself, and to enjoy nature the way others seem to. He muses that “perhaps walking is pressing / one’s weight onto things”. Thus he sees walking as an assertion of the self onto the landscape. It is an act of dominance and control.
In “Seagulls,” he ties this view of walking into broader cultural views of nature. Now the walk arrives at the seashore. An idyllic view of seagulls that the poet feels “blessed to see” is suddenly interrupted by “a motor purring where the birds fly”. In making machines, humans “extend [their] will over things,” unable to “remember the birds”. Not only do humans forget about the birds, but they also forget about trees. They cut down the woodlands and raze wildlife habitat. “Because there are no trees…[the] land has no time for itself.” The land similarly oppressed in the way the poet’s ancestors were, barred from leisure and existing on its own terms.
In response, the poet asks us to see nature as sacred. Like Thoreau’s metaphorical journey to the Holy Land, the poet finds spiritual solace among trees. He wants to escape from a world blinded by prejudice and preoccupied with efficiency, “to a place / called Infinite.” This place is described as “a tapestry of earth suspended / in a forested temple.” He requests that the tree would allow him to “lose / [his] head and find it in the / hairs of the birches”. When he climbs a beech tree, the poet feels “close to God”. Connectedness to the land is thus connectedness to the sacred.
Despite his struggle to assert himself, to feel belongingness in his adopted home, the poet concludes the collection with defiance and hope. In “Fear of Men,” he questions whether he must imagine “the trees dark at night” or “silhouettes rising, gigantic and black.” He hopes there is reason to fear no longer. In “Twilight in Roundhay,” the final poem of the book, the poet declares that he “will learn to name this me / walking through the park”. In this full-circle moment, giving himself a name is an act of autonomy. He resolves to figure out who he is in this new context, away from Jamaica, but with his homeland ever on his mind.
The themes in this collection deserve serious consideration. The idea that how we treat other people connects to how we treat nature becomes paramount in an age of racial tension and environmental peril. However, I found that in some places, as with the dogs, the handling becomes too ham-fisted. Allen-Paisant’s favorite stylistic tool was the “Enter” bar on the keyboard, giving some sections odd enjambment or syntax that made the meaning obscure. The rejection of conventional form, punctuation, and at times grammar appears to function as a statement against control over nature. The words, when read aloud, didn’t linger on the tongue or appeal to the ear.
I appreciated how the author, through repetition of key words, wove together images that repeatedly returned the main themes to the reader’s mind (although in some cases, as mentioned previously, this became over-the-top). In “Logwood”, the speaker reflects on a frieze at the University of Leeds depicting enslaved laborers carrying a trunk of logwood. This moment integrates all the themes explored in the collection. This portrait of textiles — dyed with a Caribbean plant, grown by enslaved African laborers, shipped to England, portrayed in a frieze that disappears after the racial turmoil of 2020 — is a tapestry in both the literal and metaphorical sense.
Overall, Thinking with Trees inspires readers to ponder important questions but lacks stylistic grace or innovation — not impossible to gain as one grows as a poet. I received my copy of this book from Milkweed Editions in exchange for an honest review.
