Dogwood Tree

by Jennifer Atkinson

78 pages, Hardcover

First published March 30, 1990

About the author

Apart from Drift Ice (Etruscan Press, 2008), Jennifer Atkinson is the author of two collections of poetry: The Dogwood Tree (University of Alabama Press, 1990), which won the University of Alabama Poetry Prize, and The Drowned City (Northeastern University Press, 2000), winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize. Her poetry and nonfiction can be seen in many leading journals and have been honored with Pushcart Prizes. She taught in Nepal, in Japan, at the University of Iowa, and at Washington University before joining the faculty of George Mason University.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title poem is masterful. A narrator tells us of a "she" who notices below her window the field gone "half-wild hodgepodge of color," and "she" notices too in the middle of the field a dogwood, "as straight and perfectly round | as a child would draw it" its limbs carrying overripe berries grackles and starlings "reel" from dropping to the ground like the girl who drops the bird clenching her finger in its talons. That grip is a figure for the "joy" the field, bird, the berry, the "she" and the speaker all share -- overripe, "half-wild" -- a figure of rhetorical mastery the poems delight in again and again. To have written that poem is to have done a thing permanently.