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Green Green Green
A collection of hybrid essays that engage the intersection of habitats, horticulture, and histories both poetic and personal.
- GenresEssaysNonfiction
168 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 31, 2022
Gillian Osborne’s essays cover so much ground even as it centers around Emily Dickinson and her 19th century contemporaries. She talks of "place" particularly New England and California where Gillian lived ("what it means to think or live in and of vicinities”), of the transplanted poppy and the affinity of lichen and a host of other flora, and especially “how writing takes place…in the presence of other writing” (and reading too).
She also writes of the ambiguity of poetry and what it can do untethered from narrative or structure, the promise of repetition not as information but hope, how both poetry and time spent in nature is "absorbent rather than connective," and of the particular pleasure of reading about nature in winter as a stronger call to our imagination and engagement with memory. So many takeaways to dive back into, and it was a pleasure to spend some time in this era and down this botanical and literary line of thinking.
And lists! Gillian quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson that even “bare lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind.” And a little later, she writes: “Poetry is recognizable not by its form, but in its effects....A poem, or a list, makes space for the world to enter in ways that narrative excludes.”
Two favorite Dickinson anecdotes were of the botanist Edward Hitchcock, whose book on local flowers was a comfort to Emily "when Flowers annually died" (and reading about nature in winter!). And upon meeting fellow writer and her future editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily hands him day lilies as "an introduction."
She also writes of the ambiguity of poetry and what it can do untethered from narrative or structure, the promise of repetition not as information but hope, how both poetry and time spent in nature is "absorbent rather than connective," and of the particular pleasure of reading about nature in winter as a stronger call to our imagination and engagement with memory. So many takeaways to dive back into, and it was a pleasure to spend some time in this era and down this botanical and literary line of thinking.
And lists! Gillian quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson that even “bare lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind.” And a little later, she writes: “Poetry is recognizable not by its form, but in its effects....A poem, or a list, makes space for the world to enter in ways that narrative excludes.”
Two favorite Dickinson anecdotes were of the botanist Edward Hitchcock, whose book on local flowers was a comfort to Emily "when Flowers annually died" (and reading about nature in winter!). And upon meeting fellow writer and her future editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Emily hands him day lilies as "an introduction."
March 21, 2022
Something about context sears content, fuses it with experience, locks it away in a salvageable memory vault.
A dead body is a seed.
An Element of Blank
In a pond, tadpoles consider a frog that made them, or a frog they'll soon become.
There is no option outside of embodied living.
Metaphor is a liquid commandment.
The desire to be judged to have used our bodies well enough to settle them into a handless house forever should direct what we labor at on earth.
We took each other's half-formed thoughts and said them back to each other as though hearing them in another's voice would give them air.
A dead body is a seed.
An Element of Blank
In a pond, tadpoles consider a frog that made them, or a frog they'll soon become.
There is no option outside of embodied living.
Metaphor is a liquid commandment.
The desire to be judged to have used our bodies well enough to settle them into a handless house forever should direct what we labor at on earth.
We took each other's half-formed thoughts and said them back to each other as though hearing them in another's voice would give them air.
June 12, 2022
No words
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November 22, 2024i wish it was written in a less formal tone, i would’ve appreciated even more from the author’s own world but maybe this book just wasn’t really for me. still enjoyed reading
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews