Conversations with Trees
So one day North Carolina poet Laura Hope-Gill was wandering around the Internet and she came across the Blue Ridge photographs of Asheville photographer John Fletcher. She was so moved by what she saw she sat down and wrote poems about each of them, right then and there. Then she emailed the poems to Fletcher (and what a gift that must have been to find in his inbox the next morning). He sent her more photos. She wrote more poems. And naturally, like grass growing tall in the summer, the poems and the photos came together to become a book.
Conversation
The tree said to the sunlight:
How is it I do not grow tired?
The sun said to the evergreen:
You are what I turn into
When I want to touch the earth.
The Soul Tree ended up as an Okra Pick from Southern indie booksellers, despite its list price of $49.95. (We used soy ink and environmentally-friendly printing methods, said the author, because we couldn’t do a book celebrating nature and destroy it in the process). But what I like about the poems is their immediacy, against the eternal feeling of mountains and old trees.
