The Tree Line: Poems for Trees, Woods & People
£10.00
with a Foreword by Clive Anderson, President of the Woodland Trust
An anthology celebrating trees and woodlands in the UK and beyond. In 2017, on the 800th anniversary of the sealing of the Charter of the Forest, the Woodland Trust along with over 70 other organisations published a new ‘Charter for Trees, Woods & People’. To shape this new Charter they asked the public to share their memories of trees and tell them why trees are important. This anthology complements this work by asking the same questions through poetry: a Charter for Trees, Woods & People in verse.
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The anthology features over 60 poems in response to the 1217 Charter of the Forest, trees or woodlands of personal significance to the poets and how how trees have shaped our society, landscape and lives. In this anthology you’ll find poems about trees in gardens and along the sides of roads, trees to climb and build dens in, favourite trees cut down. Poems about childhood, memory, history, motherhood, nationhood, law, mythology and death. Poems about turning into trees. Poems about getting lost in the woods. Poems about oak, ash, alder, pine, chestnut, birch and many more besides.
The Poets
Simon Armitage ● Mona Arshi ● Joanne Ashcroft ● Jean Atkin ● D.M. Black ● Stephen Boyce ● Alison Brackenbury ● James Brookes ● Andy Brown ● Judy Brown ● Elizabeth-Jane Burnett ● Ruth Calway ● Peter Carpenter ● Gillian Clarke ● John Wedgwood Clarke ● Elizabeth Cook ● Swithun Cooper ● Luigi Coppola ● Martyn Crucefix ● Rachel Curzon ● Jonathan Davidson ● Isobel Dixon ● Maura Dooley ● Peter Kane Dufault ● Jonathan Edwards ● Martina Evans ● Richard Evans ● Suzannah Evans ● Sally Flint ● Harriet Fraser ● John Freeman ● Vivien Freeman ● John Greening ● Matthew Griffiths ● Philip Gross ● Alyson Hallett ● Lesley Harrison ● Ailsa Holland ● Michael Laskey ● Harry Man ● Patricia McCarthy ● Michael McKimm ● Matt Merritt ● Helen Moore ● David Morley ● Helen Mort ● Andrew Motion ● Grace Nichols ● Carolyn Oulton ● Barry Patterson ● Mario Petrucci ● Kate Potts ● Peter Robinson ● Carol Rowntree Jones ● Linda Saunders ● Joanna Seldon ● Penelope Shuttle ● Ben Smith ● Em Strang ● Paul Sutherland ● Claire Trevien ● Anthony Wilson ● Mary Woodward ● William Wootten
The Tree Line is supported by the Legal Sustainability Alliance, a movement of legal firms who work collaboratively to improve the environmental sustainability of their activities.
In the Shade of a London Plane Tree
Sipping tea in your spirit’s shade
the kind-house provided for my face
on this hot summer’s day –
I wonder about your maple-like leaves
the rings of your age
your spiked fruit-balls
that display themselves like pom-poms
stirred by an inaudible sway of music –
a merging of Oriental Plane and American sycamore –
your hybrid-heart at home in any condition –
winter-dampness or a city’s heat-waving pollution –
a hardy Londoner if ever there was one.
Trees – how they intercede
for us, in their green tolerance.
Grace Nichols
Published: 01 June 2017
ISBN: 9781905208371
Pages: 146
“It’s an anthology of diverse, vibrant and considered reflections, ideas and styles that bear witness to the vitality of trees in our daily existence. […] a skilful and engaging mix, well edited by Michael McKimm. […] It stems from an urgent necessity to engage with and protect our environment, and this conversation lies at its heart. In the ways of artistry, this necessity is expressed by these poems and those wisdoms they embody, and with which we want to engage via our own, personal landscapes, represented not least by the enduring resilience of the tree, a living thing that can both predate and outlast us all.” The Ecologist
Read a review at London Grip magazine
Read a review at Tears in the Fence magazine
Michael McKimm was born in Belfast and grew up near the Giant’s Causeway. A graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme, he won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and was an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa in 2010. HIs most recent poetry collection is Because we could not dance at the wedding (Worple, 2023), following Still This Need (Heaventree Press, 2009) and Fossil Sunshine (Worple, 2013). Or Land the Sea: a photo-poem, a geo-poetic collaboration with artist Julie Cuthbert, was published in 2024. Michael has also edited two anthologies of new poetry: MAP: Poems after William Smith’s Geological Map of 1815 (Worple, 2015) and The Tree Line: Poems for Trees, Woods & People (Worple, 2017). www.michaelmckimm.co.uk
