A POTENT AND PARTICULAR LANDSCAPE
AP2 Books
C.D. Wright, Casting Deep Shade: An Amble
Hardcover, 160 pages
Copper Canyon Press, 2019
“I waken repeatedly to gnarly misgivings and adversarial imagining… in flaming dread of us, the next annihilating asteroid,” confesses C.D. Wright in Casting Deep Shade: An Amble. Wright’s last and latest book is an interview with the natural phenomena and history of the beech tree.1 Formally, the collection leans toward the prose portion of the prosimetric form (prosimetrum: part prose, part poetry) for which Wright’s simultaneously experimental and conversational work is known. Yet the figure of “an amble” aptly depicts the various pacing and hybrid explorations of the text as it roams the botanical, the historical, the anecdotal and the personal. Casting Deep Shade is a collation, collection and curation of widely disparate sources—a collage of place, memoir, climate, memory, colonialism, economics, science and literature.
Written in many short, visually discreet parts, is a text a reflects the readerly qualities of the long poem described by Rachel Zucker in her essay “An Anatomy of the Long Poem.” Zucker writes,
