You grow up in a place like suburban New Orleans, and one of the first things you learn is that the land on which the suburbs float was at one time marsh or swap. My own childhood home had two huge cypress trees in the yard, and they never did quite thrive like they did in marsh-days. The one next to the driveway died first, the cement partially blocking water from reaching its roots. A few years later, the one in the front yard died as well. Even in humidity- and rain-rich New Orleans, it needed more water than allowed by the St. Augustine grass.
I thought about those cypress trees as I read Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks: Poems by Jack Bedell. Bedell is a professor of English and coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, which sits “across the lakes” from New Orleans, the lakes being Borgne, Pontchartrain, and Maurepas. It’s just up the road from Ponchatoula, which for a very long time laid a legitimate claim to being the strawberry capital of the world.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
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