New Poetry Anthology Explores Our Relationship with Trees

Inspiration provides a stimulus for creation, but the word also carries another meaning—the inhalation of air. Both meanings are at play in the new anthology Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees (Caitlin Press, April 2022). For poets have long breathed deep the wonder of trees to inspire their work, and the 136 poets collected here are no exception. The anthology, edited by Christine Lowther, Poet Laureate of Tofino from 2020 to 2022, provides an immersive, collective experience: we can revel in the poems while remembering that we all share the universal connection that is the gift of trees—the air we breath.

“The poems connect us on many levels, and from that connection I hope comes the inspiration to maybe be a bit more active for trees,” says Lowther who created the anthology during her tenure as poet laureate. It was the perfect project for her to involve people with poetry, despite the isolating constraints of COVID.

“Every poem is like a wakeup call, helping us to not just look at trees, but to experience them emotionally, physically, spiritually,” says Lowther. “It’s all about taking notice and really observing.”

Out of the “thousands” of submissions, Lowther saw that the poems organized themselves naturally into four themes— connection, ecology, grief, and protection—and divided the anthology accordingly. Thanks to the nuanced and complex voices in this collection of some of Canada’s most established poets, there’s nothing prescriptive about the book’s structure, however. I preferred to wander through the pages and experience the poems at random. One of the strengths of the anthology is the variety of poetic voices, visions and techniques that take the reader on an emotional journey—from mourning, to outrage, to love, to nostalgia, to reverence, to spiritual awakening. It’s difficult not to come away from the poems without a deeper understanding of the symbolic resonance of our relationship to trees: they give us oxygen, shelter, fuel, shade, beauty and joy, and they link earth to sky, helping us see connections with the spiritual realm.

Of course, Worth More Standing can also be read as a piece of literary activism, and it’s no less powerful in this context. There is a connection here too. “I think activists feel deeply and so do poets,” says Lowther, who grew up in a family where activism was a way of life. Her late mother, the poet Pat Lowther, brought her along to picket developments in south

Vancouver, and nurtured her love for trees and the natural world— evidenced in her own volumes of poetry, New Power (Broken Jaw Press, 1999), My Nature (Leaf Press, 2010), and Half-Blood Poems (Zossima Press, 2011).

“Poets around the world, from Russian dissidents risking their lives, to writers here, such as Susan McCaslin, can create change,” she says. “Susan encouraged people to write poems and tied them around trees to save a forest from developers in Maple Ridge. Every time a poet speaks to people on a level that gets them to think about an issue, it’s activism.”

It could be argued that poetry is uniquely suited to the job, because as Worth More Standing amply illustrates, poems can influence readers in a way that’s outside of normal conventions, suggesting new possibilities, new ways of seeing. And encouraging people to examine or even change how they think and feel about an issue is the first step to a constructive conversation in a wider social context.

“Poetry works in wild and crazy ways, with less reliance on rules, such as grammar,” says Lowther. “Therefore it opens up more room for the imagination. And if you can imagine a better world, hopefully you’ll be open to the idea of doing something to make that better world happen.”

I recommend, as a first step, visiting your local bookstore for a copy of Worth More Standing. Go home, take a virtual walk through a forest of poems, and start thinking about what you can do for the trees.

Melanie Higgs is a writer whose favourite tree is the English Oak.

Celebrate Pollinator Month

This month at the Cowichan Green Community, we are celebrating Pollinator Month with a series of workshops in local parks. This is a part of a community-wide re-wilding initiative called The Resiliency Project, focused on planting native wildflower meadows throughout local parks and green spaces. When we plant native wildflowers in our yards and green spaces, we help to provide essential habitat to a large diversity of native pollinators and other beneficial insects, and when we do this together as a community, we can really have a positive ecological impact! Come out and join us in this local movement to reweave our connections to the ecosystem, and learn about how you can create habitat for bees, butterflies, and birds in your own backyard! To find more information about the workshop series, and reserve your tickets, please visit www.cowichangreencommunity. org.