Wright’s tree-visitations are shadowed by the ubiquitous complaints of 21st-century “Thoreaus,” bereft among threatened forests and polluted waterways. “Casting Deep Shade” is less a conventional text than a facsimile of a tree’s growth outward - a cumulative chronology in rings of thought.

Yet her book serves a practical purpose too, as an approximation of a field guide (or eccentric “field homage”) to beeches and their world. Wright casts a familiar linguistic spell with her thinking-aloud genre-bending voice here: a signature elliptical “prosimetric” style. Her book could be read alongside Annie Proulx’s novel “Barkskins” and other recent literature that considers the complicated relationship between humans and trees. She became entranced by beeches (and their fellow trees, their “Co.”), which led to decades of wide-ranging research, including interviews with naturalists, historians and arborists - sometimes even “interviews” with trees themselves. Wright’s amble began when she was commissioned, years ago, to write an essay on a single beech tree.

This shifting mediation between dark and light, velocity and stasis, poetry and root-based reporting, informs a style, a tour through what Wright refers to at one point, quoting Verlyn Klinkenborg, as an “arboretum of the mind.” Yet just as “ambling” trundles forward, “inscribed” stays still, denoting words written (or carved) on a surface, in witness. The book’s subtitle reaffirms the need to witness what briefly lives and breathes: “An Amble Inscribed to Beech Trees & Co.” “Amble” is how Wright describes her strategic moseying through forests, old-growth bowers and backyards, taking notes. I can see the tree that cast your lawn in deep shade when you were wearing a linen dress, a string of seed pearls, and no underpants.” You get her drift? The gerund points to a “Macbeth”-like conspiracy of tree and human, each “throwing shade.” Here, for example, is Wright on privacy in an all-witnessing age: “For the moment, I can locate you, whosoever you are, or re-imagine you in a keystroke. The title is a trick or a kind of riddle. This posthumous book might have been read strictly as elegy, yet Wright, as if presciently marking a trail through the woods for future readers, came up with a sly signpost of a title as “pre-amble” to her work, briskly excluding melancholy even while taking stock of crimes against nature. Wright, renowned poet and essayist, completed “Casting Deep Shade” just before her sudden death in January of 2016. CASTING DEEP SHADE An Amble Inscribed to Beech Trees & Co.

Casting Deep Shade by C.D. Wright