Ten Thousand Trees

Ten Thousand Trees

Ten Thousand Trees is grounded in the minutiae of the living beings teeming in the forests of North Carolina’s Southern Appalachians. It’s a celebration, in the tradition of Walt Whitman and William Bartram, of the interconnectedness of all living things, from the smallest microbes to the greatest trees – even to rocks and the mountains themselves. The book shares themes with Glazier’s Transparent Mountain, with a deepened focus on the individuality of phenomena known through observation. It offers interactions with characters from that book, including an imaginary William Bartram and the astute Turtle Girl, while also introducing Spotfin, an endemic, endangered fish of the Little Tennessee River, wry and insightful, living in the narrator’s pocket. This long poem sequence delves into Buddhism, poetry, history, natural philosophy, and natural science, weaving among the “ten thousand things,” the whole of all beings, myriad, infinite, and always changing. Here, a hybrid of magical realism and imagination seems entirely natural in a land of walking mountains, audibly breathing trees, the embraces of plants, and rocks – all things together sharing a collective mind vaster than man’s. In this book, connection becomes flexible, consciousness turns fluid, the scale of existence expands, and time is revealed as the fact of who we are. From the smallest beings under leaf litter to distant nebulae, mushrooms lasting for minutes, trees that turn into crocodiles, and myriad botanical joys, this book evokes a consciousness bigger than individual egos. Ten Thousand Trees offers readers an illuminating understanding of a state of complete integration with our living world. – Publisher's Statement

On Ten Thousand Trees

There’s an irresistible charm to a work that exclaims, “So, this is what the songbirds / see in me!” Haunted by Whitman, Wordsworth, John Clare and others, Glazier sees the mind as daffodils, hears trees inhaling carbon dioxide, knows the rakish angle of Jupiter’s moons, and notices that rocks linger. The whole book radiates a joy rooted in exceptionally acute attention to the outside world, with respect and affection emanating from every line. – Cole Swensen (And And And)

I am stunned and astounded by the thickness, swiftness, and all around simultaneity of space-time particularity in Loss Pequeño Glazier’s Ten Thousand Trees. Rushing back and forth from text to dictionary (things evoked with such scientific specificity, an education in itself ) I am gasping at this overwhelming demonstration of the multiverse as BuddhaDharma, as described by Dogen as BeingTime and Interpenetration of All in All. In these seven brilliant extended works from the Great Smoky Mountain forests and everywhere else, Glazier shows us all this all at once in the silence and fullness of his self-erasing words. Whitman wrote himself large, but Glazier writes larger, going beyond the visible and imaginable into the ineffable buried in the smallest and largest physical things. — Norman Fischer (When You Greet Me I Bow)

On Transparent Mountain

Loss Pequeño Glazier's new epic poem is an incredible statement on the power of observation, and attention to place. Much in the spirit of William Bartram, Transparent Mountain is full of both love and lamentation for these southern mountains and for all of life on this amazing planet. – Brent Martin, Executive Director, Blue Ridge Bartram Trail Conservancy (George Masa’s Wild Vision)

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