The Hardy Tree

by Linda Bierds

Overview

Focusing on figures such as Thomas Hardy, Alan Turing, Virginia Woolf, and the World War One poets, The Hardy Tree examines power, oppression and individual rights in ways that reverberate through our lives today. Uniting these themes is the issue of communication—the various methods and codes we use to reach one another. The book is arranged in four sections. The first visits Vladimir Nabokov as a child with alphabet blocks, Alan Turing at eleven writing home from boarding school with a “pen of his own making,” Virginia Woolf as a teenager practicing her penmanship, and Wilfred Owen trying to draw a musical note from a blade of grass on a battlefield on the Somme. The second section focuses more deeply on various types of encoding; the third erases the Magna Carta; the fourth offers a provisional peace. These sections lean against one another the way that history leans upon itself. Backed by Bierds’ intensive research and woven with scientific evidence, she pushes us to consider our futures in direct conversation with the past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556595769
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	09/10/2019
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Linda Bierds’ ninth book of poetry, Roget’s Illusion (Putnam’s, 2014) was longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Smithsonian, and Poetry. In addition to being awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, Bierds has received the PEN/West Poetry Prize, the Washington State Governor’s Writers Award, the Consuelo Ford Award from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and twice from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the Grace Pollock Professor of Creative Writing at the Universityof Washington in Seattle and lives on Bainbridge Island.

Read an Excerpt

Self Portrait: A Cento

I can’t be alone in this,
the wars are everywhere, o even within.

Alone, I am nothing and there’s the shape of nothing caught in air:

an O without a figure,
grain of the night sky’s empty hour.

I forget and remember and forget the who I am and who are you, the who

too thin to cipher and with no start and end,
sewn together & torn apart,

stretched out like variable stars,
like anyone’s portrait as a path of ill-formed light.

EVOLUTION

How, Alan Turing thought, does the soft-walled,
jellied, symmetrical cell become the asymmetrical horse? It was just before dusk,
the sun’s last shafts doubling the fence posts,
all the dark mares on their dark shadows. It was just after Schrodinger’s What is Life,
not long before Watson, Franklin, Crick, not long before supper. How does a chemical soup,
he asked, give rise to a biological pattern? And how does a pattern shift, an outer ear
Gradually slough its fur, or a shorebird’s stubby beak sharpen toward the trout?
He was halfway between the War’s last engimas and the cyanide apple—two bites—
that would kill him. Halfway along the taut wires that hummed between crime and pardon, indecency and privacy. How do solutions,
chemical, personal, stable, unstable harden into shapes? And how do shapes break?
What slips a micro-fissure across a lightless cell, until time and matter double their easy bickering? God?
Chance? A chemical shudder? He was happy and not,
tired and not, humming a bit with the fence wires. How does a germ split to a self?
And what is a—We are not our acts and rememberances, Schrodinger wrote, Should something—
God, chance, a chemical shudder?—
sever us from all we have been, still it would not kill us.
It was just before dusk, his segment of earth slowly ticking toward night. Like time, he thought,
we are almost erased by rotation,
as the dark, symmetrical planet lifts its asymmetrical cargo up to the sunset: horses, ryegrass—
In no case, then, is there a loss of personal existence to deplore—
marten, whitethroat, blackbird,
lark—nor will there ever be.

Editorial Reviews

08/19/2019

In this erudite and ever-dexterous 10th collection, Bierds poignantly juxtaposes terror with beauty by excavating the literal and symbolic role of language. Through an assortment of poetic techniques including pastiche, erasure, and acrostics, Bierds reimagines and expands on the musings of Vladimir Nabokov, Alan Turing, Virginia Woolf, and WWI-era poets, utilizing their diverse insights and experiences to unveil moments of vulnerability, violence, and desperation in the world. Bierds considers the catalysts of progress and the elliptical nature of human existence as “a looped orbit, half/ doomed to the past as we wheel forward.” She questions the artillery of destruction with the grace of nature, such as how “So many poisons// smell like hay. Or lilacs. Or geraniums” and how the zeppelins consumed the sky like “a sudden moon...a massive, white,/ gondola-cratered fullness...Except for the terrible drumming.” In a deceptive and bewildering world, she describes the need “to speak in codes, in key-clicks and ciphers,” referring both to language as a weapon of war and poetry as a vessel to translate the inexplicable. Bierds’s poems transform the surreal into the tangible, challenging readers to reconsider the realities that daily life might obscure. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Her poems, with their constantly surprising delicacy and their language rich with insight and a sensuous music, radiate real power and authority and animal presence.” — W. S. Merwin

“In language both delicious and precise, poems by MacArthur Fellow Bierds inhabit the realm of illusion and the human need for clarity.” — Library Journal

“She uses the English language as a composer of symphonic music might use an orchestra, taking romantic sighs, noble passages and high-flown trills from a full range of vocabulary and reference.” — Publishers Weekly

“Visionary.” — The New Yorker

“Radiant.” — The New York Times Book Review

“If the glow, whether the mind of God or humankind’s “inmost lights,” cannot ultimately be expressed in full, Bierds nevertheless offers us a brilliant and beautiful map of ways to approach that glow.” — Blackbird

“In this manner, Bierds has created an individual body of work the past two decades that is always refreshingly different and repeatedly satisfying in its originality. Bierds’s poems explore territory not well traveled by many of her fellow poets.” — Valparaiso Poetry Review

From the Publisher

09/27/2019

Long a resident of the West Coast, Bierds (Roget's Illusion; creative writing, Univ. of Washington) has enjoyed a quiet but blessed career. To the delight of discerning readers, she began publishing in the early 1970s (e.g., Flights of the Harvest-Mare), and she shares with Elizabeth Bishop, Lorine Niedecker, and Amy Clampitt a quality of careful and even minute attention to her craft; she sees more deeply and lovingly than almost any other living writer. This newest collection is haunted by the specter of gay mathematical genius Alan Turing even more than the title namesake Thomas Hardy; Bierds visits and revisits Turing's guessed perceptions and the dreadful injustices done to him with the richest sympathy, perhaps to help us all expiate the wrongs he suffered. Bierds is unusually adventurous in her use of the ancient form of the cento, offering a grab bag of lines from other poets reintegrated into a new whole; her experiments here are among the best poems in the volume. VERDICT Any new collection by Bierds is a blessing, and this one will not disappoint; her sensitive poems about Turing are lessons for aspiring readers or poets on the application of history to the creative impulse and power of poetry to illuminate the past.—Graham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA

Library Journal