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The Afterlife of Trees is Brian Bartlett's fifth collection of poetry. Recently, he has been busy editing a collection of essays on Don McKay, due to be published in 2004 by Guernica under their Writers Series. The influence of McKay and nature poetry is evident throughout this collection. Naturalist and birder, Bartlett's keen attention to the world results in poems that celebrate its beauty and honour its mysteries.

The volume consists of four sections:  A Box for Small Births,  the long poem  Hawthornden Improvisations  (winner of the 1997 Malahat Review Long Poem Prize),  A World of Counting,  and another long poem,  Talking to the Birds.  The opening section contains short lyrics inspired principally, but not exclusively, by the natural world. The poems here are sensitively written, with Bartlett's careful observation of his subject evident in each. In the opening poem,  Listening on the Back Steps,  the speaker recounts how, as a boy, he would sneak out at night in order to listen to jazz wafting out the back door of a local club. The poem closes with the image of the speaker  short-breathed, hunched, listening to that voice ... float[ing] through the night.  It's this image, of the poet as listener, which Bartlett wants us to take from the opening poem. The image recurs throughout the collection, most notably at the close of the long poem  Hawthornden Improvisations,  the centre-piece of the volume:  At the desk I look up / and hear something - a cry bending into a squawk, / just that, once - and I answer it without speaking.  Here the gesture is extended to a response, the nature poet's dynamic of listening and answering - perception and poetry.

In  Two for the Winds  (the title itself acknowledging tribute), the speaker notices the single item, a strip of birch-bark, stirred by an almost imperceptible breeze. In  Under the Old Roof,  it is not subtlety but magnificence which awes the speaker:  When I slid from sleep and out of the tent, the star-jammed / blackness nearly threw me on my back.  Yet, even in a poem about the cosmos, we find the speaker  scribbling / mental notes on [a toad's] ridges and humps,  creating a tension between perspectives - the camper under the night sky versus the toad at his feet - which helps us step out of egocentrism and, like the speaker at the poem's close, find ourselves observed.

 What I want is what / shakes up the known,  the speaker states in another poem from the opening section, echoing the concern of nature poets to, as Don McKay has put it,  circumvent the mind's appropriations  ( Baler Twine: Thoughts on Raven, Home, and Nature Poetry ). The title poem, dedicated to McKay, explores this idea more fully. After listing some of the many uses of trees for us (food, shade, navigation), the speaker concludes that trees  first and last are / utterly themselves, fuller and finer than any letter or number,  those names and labels we give them. We see the speaker sanding down some old furniture, another use of trees, and admiring the beauty of the grain:

What looks more beautiful after death? We sand
and sand, but under the stain, beyond our pottery
and books, our fallen hairs trapped in the varnish,
something remains like memories of a buck
rubbing its horns on bark. Soaked in
deeper than the grain goes: cries, whistles, hoots.

The speaker acknowledges that  something  remains in the wood from the tree's life, deeper than layers of human utility. The appropriation is never complete, and the tree's being remains other to human use and understanding.

The poem which follows,  A Toss of Cones,  playfully addresses the former, presenting the other side of the coin by praising now living trees:

Don't talk to me about the afterlife of trees.
I need places where sap drops in a bucket
and jack pines start up through fire-blackened soil,
where wingseeds spin down through the air, a toss
of cones on the orange earth.

The point here is not so much to articulate contrasting views as to point out our intimate and complex relationship with trees and, by extension, nature. One key way we  relate  to trees, as the epigraph of the volume indicates, is through their consumption for the purpose of making paper. Quoting Roland Bechmann in Trees and Man : The Forest in the Middle Ages , we are told that book , bush , wood , and log all stem from the same Latin root, boscus, and that writing has become the main consumer of wood. In the long poem  Hawthornden Improvisations,  (drafted at the writers' retreat at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland), Bartlett examines this theme, turning his attention to the relationship between poetry, perception, and the natural world by exploring his own (improvisational) writing process.

What is apparent throughout this long poem is Bartlett's abounding love for nature. While exploring the dark and oppressive dungeon of Hawthornden Castle, the speaker's hands  itch to thrust out / reaching and twisting for a touch,  through a small opening, of  light-soaked leaves and trees.  Toward the poem's climax, this connection with the natural world takes on greater significance as it is linked with writing and the speaker's ability to cope with despair. Reflecting on an ex-girlfriend's suicide, the speaker concludes:

The girl with  a voice of handbells  became a woman
and I heard no more of her until she cut her ties
to the earth. Long ago those tempting, taunting scissors
appeared to me, in a cloud but clear;
then I'd wake up one morning sooner or later

to the odd, unexpected comfort of some small thing -
a many-veined leaf sealed in amber-like ice,
a few syllables by Issa about an insect -
and wonder if I were sick not to feel sicker.
Maybe it's a lucky gene that makes some of us

clutch any small mercy tightly, lifted away
from ourselves toward a stray bar of music
in the wind, or a view of the North Sea from a train
like a vista of promised water and sky
that gives despair, like the oak and the plum tree, a place.

This is Bartlett at his finest. The language is accessible, almost conversational, yet with a subtle rhetorical tension, rooted in physical details, that protects it from slipping into the banal or sentimental. A large part of its success can be attributed to the musical rhythm that carries the lines forward before letting them gently fall in the closing line of the section. No wonder there are references to music, another of Bartlett's passions, scattered throughout the volume.

The strongest poems of the collection are the long meditative pieces through the third section. Here we find poems in which the speaker reflects on his past, such as  Work at Twenty-One,   Three Windows,  and  After the Age of Parties.  The voice is reminiscent of early Robert Lowell - contemplative, quiet, and honest. Again, what makes these poems a success is Bartlett's attention to visual details and ability to strike the right rhetorical pitch at the right moment, such as in  Work At Twenty-One,  when the young speaker comes face to face for the first time with death:

The next night Mr. Finestone's face went blue, then grey.
The young man in the thready smock retreated
to the windows, useless, his hands pocketed to keep
from shaking, the view blocked by nurses and doctors
and machines, sudden thirst drying out his throat.
He'd never before stood in a room where death
climbed triumphantly atop another and crowed.

Rarely does Bartlett miss with such risks, when the poem suddenly rises out of description to epiphany. Even when there is no deliberate closure, no authorial comment, such as in the strictly observational poem  Diner in a Storm,  the visual attention is enough to lift the description into the lyrical.  Foot-doctor for the Homeless  and  The Sonographer,  the two poems which conclude section three, are particularly strong. It's refreshing to be out of the autobiographical second and third-person into first-person personae. The voice in these poems is colloquial and idiomatic, expressing the speakers' essential characters. There is also a social edge to  Foot-doctor  not found in the other poems in the collection. In such poems, Bartlett exhibits a capacity for sympathy within human society as well as Nature.

The final section of the volume,  Talking to the Birds,  is a serial long poem, each poem dedicated and addressed to a particular species in an I/You relationship between speaker and bird. Here we return again to the motif of listening and response, the poem a celebration of each bird's unique essence. I'm not a birder, but I was able to enjoy these poems for their sudden and surprising twists and turns through metaphysical space, never failing to light upon a few bewildering ornithological facts. As the speaker acknowledges in  to an osprey,   Even as I say you , I know I'm talking to myself.  There is no naive Romantic relationship here, the bird as auditor of the speaker's tribute. These meditative poems spiral inward from sensual details to metaphysical truths in a process which recognizes the limits of knowing in the bird's distance and otherness.  For landlubbers at sea, out there / turns into out here , but our minds aren't big enough / to know your days as you know them,  the speaker states in  to a sooty shearwater.  Like birding, the relationship described is one of visitation, where poetic perception and understanding is both partial and fleeting. Collectively, however, the poems which comprise the long poem bring us closer to the incomprehensible. This is suggested in the epigraph to the long poem, from Wallace Stevens' Opus Posthumous :

... one's cry of O Jerusalem becomes little by little
a cry to something a little nearer and nearer until
at last one cries out to a living name, a living
place, a living thing.

The poems in The Afterlife of Trees are sensitive, meditative, and artistically mature. They do not rely on technical cleverness or rhetorical gimmick, but on much thought and attention to the world and poetic craft. They come from that mysterious and elusive place of composition which cannot be taught, but only discovered through a hard discipline and dedication to the page. With this collection and the recently published Wanting the Day: Selected Poems (2003), Brian Bartlett deserves to be considered one of Canada's major poets.