Green-Wood

by Allison Cobb

Poetry. Nonfiction. Allison Cobb wanders Brooklyn's famous nineteenth-century Green-Wood Cemetery and discovers that its 500 acres—hills and ponds, trees and graves—mirror the American a place marked by greed, war, and death, but still pulsing with life. The book is a testament to what survives and an elegy for what is lost, the long dead, the landscape itself, but especially those who died in the Twin Towers and in the United States's ongoing wars.

Genres: Poetry, Essays, New York, Science, Nonfiction, History

166 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2010

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cobb uses the Greenwood cemetery as her spring board to spiral her chunks of prose outward into things closely associated with cemeteries, like landscaping, pesticide/herbicide use, 9-11, decorative hat feathers, tribes in Papua New Guinea, the French Museum of Natural history...Oh, wait. It's a proliferative project that would foil any simple description such as this. Throughout what emerges is not private, personal elegy (this is present as absence) but --a patient investigation into the various regimes of management (sometimes alarmingly gendered) which plan, maintain, and police this space of the dead--a tracing of the circulation of the sometimes quite toxic materials of the cemetery (pesticides, agent orange), their use in other public works, war--a recuperation of what and who is included and excluded from this space of public grief, particularly post 9-11--an exploration of American writing about nature, space, and history w/Emerson & Howe prominent--


File under: lyric essay. Reminders: Marcella Durand's traffic & weather and Lisa Robertson's Occasional Work and Seven Walks, Kaia Sand Remember to Wave.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book on its own, but completely thrilling and uncanny when read simultaneously with Susan Howe.

[Rye · Rating 4 out of 5]

"...leave the blighted city and immerse [yourselves] in the continent's untouched nature: space, the air, the river, the leaf."

[Erik Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

++
Wood drove the nation's industrialization. Wood powered the steam engines, fueled the iron smelters, and fed the railroad. Between 1800 and 1900, the nation burned its forests into the atmosphere, then turned to digging fossil forests from the ground.

With increasing rapacity, loggers moved across the continent. First they cut out the hardwood and pine forests of New York and New England. Then they felled the white pine of the Lake States, then the longleaf and loblolly pine of the Southeast. Finally, they reached the sequoias and bristlecone pines of California, among the largest and oldest trees on earth.

All that ever lived about them cling to them, Emerson said about trees.
++

[Ann Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating read and not for everyone--many readers may feel frustrated by the book's "genre-confusion" (is it poetry? is it history? is it research? is it memoir? is it socio-cultural critique?); but I enjoyed that aspect once I got used to it.

So much to learn about Green-Wood, a place I've visited a few times. And yet this book is much more personal than its many facts suggest. Reflective, critical of human intervention of natural space and colonialization of this continent (violence and land-ownership principles), a brief examination of Romanticism in landscape, and much more.

Quite an unusual and rewarding book.

[Anisa Rahim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible scope, research and experimentation. This book excavates American history through the site of the cemetery. There's a powerful critique of the way we think of land and property and yet, despite all the conquest and parceling, there's also a careful deliberation and appreciation of the earth and nature too. Stylistically, I haven't read anything like this before.

[Tess · Rating 2 out of 5]

Come for the lists of trees, mini history lessons, and detailed litanies of strange items left by tombstones (that say so much without saying much—a truly beautiful feat), leave after the predictable beat-you-over-the-head, slanted, boring “Did I use all the right vocabulary? Do I win my Virtue Badge now?” lecturing.

[Caroline Meek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeous, a little chilling, thought-provoking. Cobb takes you on a walk through her cemetery with pages that step around the conventions of poetic form. I loved how much Green-wood and its author took from its natural environment. Read this while sitting under a shady tree in your own cemetery.

[William Zeng · Rating 5 out of 5]

will reread approximately three more times

[Claire Zhang · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful, haunting, I must re-read

[H · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of those books that i probably didn’t review in the first place because i had too much to say. well, i’m coming to the close of teaching this book for the third time. each semester and each new class of students offers a new experience of this book; last year allison cobb came and spoke to my students about it, which allowed me to ask some questions that have haunted me since i first read it at the start of the pandemic in my first year of grad school. it’s a research project and a grief process, a lament and a looking. so intense and so careful. i clung to it on that first read in 2020 when the world seemed to be falling apart. yesterday i said “i think grieving and being in love are the two things that derange us the most” and a student—recently heartbroken—got up and left the classroom. there’s still too much i could say about this book. suffice to say i love it a lot, i aspire to the dedication cobb has for her research, and i’m both eager and frightened to see what this spate of students thinks of the ending.