Carol Muske-Dukes Reviews C.D. Wright's Casting Deep Shade

The New York Times Book Review features Carol Muske-Dukes reviewing a posthumous book by C.D. Wright, Casting Deep Shade: An Amble Inscribed to Beech Trees & Co. (Copper Canyon, 2019). "The title is a trick or a kind of riddle," writes Muske-Dukes. "The gerund points to a 'Macbeth'-like conspiracy of tree and human, each 'throwing shade.'" More:

Wright’s amble began when she was commissioned, years ago, to write an essay on a single beech tree. She became entranced by beeches (and their fellow trees, their “Co.”), which led to decades of wide-ranging research, including interviews with naturalists, historians and arborists — sometimes even “interviews” with trees themselves. Her book could be read alongside Annie Proulx’s novel “Barkskins” and other recent literature that considers the complicated relationship between humans and trees.

Wright casts a familiar linguistic spell with her thinking-aloud genre-bending voice here: a signature elliptical “prosimetric” style. Yet her book serves a practical purpose too, as an approximation of a field guide (or eccentric “field homage”) to beeches and their world. “Casting Deep Shade” is less a conventional text than a facsimile of a tree’s growth outward — a cumulative chronology in rings of thought...

Read on right here.