This One Tree
By Katie Peterson

Winner of the 2005 New Issues Poetry Prize
William Olsen, Judge

"By looking at the world on behalf of the world, [This One Tree] offers its poetry up as a self-portrait of the world. And with what new powers of description, powers that balance all the warring senses of this currently discredited activity of poetry by committing to the genius of place, of the scribe, and of ‘scribble,’ or language itself. And with what visual command sponsored by what insistent powers of hearing, the senses at their beginning again as they, too, always were and always will be."

—William Olsen, from the foreword

"In This One Tree, I find what might very well be the salvation of our distracted, disbanded American soul: an imperative, unempirical Gaze. Peterson commends and then commands Vision in her every word, beginning with her first ones—‘Be on the lookout.’ And what I find most wonderful of all is that, here, Vision goes forward to atonement and a new name in ‘sweet alyssum’ for us all."

—Donald Revell

"No one is going to not-know what these poems intend, what they state, and why they exist. They have the rigor of Oppen and a serious eye-level attention to pieces and parts of the chosen subject that give them an analogical edge over pure description. They bring heart and soul back to the poet writing them."

—Fanny Howe

"Not Some Trees—rather, This One Tree. The wonder of Katie Peterson’s first book is that a person who knows and is persuaded by the glamorous claims on behalf of waves and fields—and all the great poetry those claims have sponsored these last several decades—has chosen instead to write about life as a particular affair, an affair of particulars. What that means is, she writes poems, not as byproducts of a ‘poetics’ or a ‘project’ but as the result of great linguistic brilliance summoned by the hunger to make art. This is a polemical book, as the title suggests: its great poems (‘At The Very Beginning’ among a dozen or so others) suggest that one need be every bit as intelligent, cunning, strange and heartbroken as this to write lyric poetry."

—Dan Chiasson

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
| Home | Book Index |