Are you looking for a book to relish your taste for being a naturalist or a nature-lover? Then “A Passionate Affair with Trees” by Lily Swarn is one such book. The book is a wonderful collection of 109 poems ranging from brevity to long epic-like poems, reflective of nature’s resplendence. It is more like a documentary of moments captured through the series of ephemeral seasons, displaying episodes of serenity and tranquillity.
The book is a portfolio of the journey through the grass blades, twining creepers and climbers, trailing vines, rosy bushes, and the big trees. The poet’s relation with plants is sacred, secret, soulful, spiritual, and sentimental. As she puts it:
‘Some trees seem like sons to me
Some are like mothers’
The poems come with extensive word choice and spectral analysis capturing the essence of euphoria to absolute melancholy expressed through bits and pieces of trees- a leaf, a skin-tight bud, a scented flower, a drooping branch, and a crunchy hard bark. The title “ A passionate affair with trees”, like a crafted monostich is summarising the verse. The poems are testament of the fact that the poet is a passionate dendrophile and a prolific writer. With rich imagery she has recorded minute details of everything, from a particle of soil to the dewdrops hanging like dangling earrings from the tip of a leaf margin. The poet has draped the poems between royal robes of figures of speech and festooned the pages with scented petals and rustic leaves.
The relation and passion, the poet has for trees, is also beyond poetry. The book is like a poetic dissertation of a learned botanist and the poems are like research thesis of a romantic nature conservationist. The pages have details of everything, from a single leaf left on the bend bough to the majestic emerald canopy, and from a petal of a flower pot to the hanging strings of tall blossoms.
The poem, “On world Wildlife Day”, Is an illustration of the green gold with magical directory of wild animals. It’s not lesser than a biography of a forest.
“Just look at me!
suffused with bounteous plenty
I am the Amazonian jungle
I am also the Himalayan woods
I who store carbon in my leaves roots trunks and soil
I who am home to 300 million people
I will provide lumber for firewood, furniture, and give resins, medicines food”
The poems also expose vulnerability of the vegetation by human exploitation and capture the grievances of the trees towards the humans. In such more poems, the poet expresses a devotion and dedication everyone needs to have for trees:
“Don’t uproot your earth
Instead help me be!
For I may simply swallow you up
And then there will be
No you and no me!”
“Keep them safe like the deep roots of traditions
don’t let them ever rot and rust”
There is stunning imagery and outstanding metaphors in the poems that allow a reader to resonate trees with so many things and qualities. The poet relates a tree as an affectionate embrace of maternal solace, offering salute and Sajda, calling them unsung Gurus.
Taking pen like a brush of a master artist, dipped in a pail of paint, the poems are painted on the canvas of heart and mind like multiple strokes and shades of a particular colour. The hues are versatile, ranging from grandiose green to ruddy red.
“I savour life in hues divine.”
The poet is stubborn with her passion and admiration for trees. She has crafted poems as a true lover and sees the beauty of plants in the blooms of spring, in the sizzling heat of summer, in the blaze of autumn, and in the barren cold of winter.
“Till I had had my fill
Of the wondrous world
The creator fashioned”
From their flamboyant gestures to the pallid complexions, every tree has a story to tell. The trees mentioned in the book are aptly symbolic of human emotions, beauty, philosophy, mythology, medicine, cuisine, divinity and passionate love. As the poet puts it, compassion of the Gulmohar, truth of the Amaltas, teachings of the Weeping Willow, contentment of the Jacaranda, humility of the Banyan and love of the mango. The beauty-cloaked scenery revives the nerves of the reader and brings a hypnotic spell.
The book is for nature admirers, for trekkers, for travellers, for all the poetry lovers. The poems are like wistful wish with sweetness of love, colour and sounds. The book demands to be read calmly in some cozy corner, to soothe your eyes and connect your soul to the strings of nature.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Rafiya Sayeed is a poet and educator. She writes English poetry and also composes lullabies and children songs in regional languages. Her work has been featured on various online literary platforms and magazines, reflecting her deep love for poetry.
