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by Maureen Alsop (Author)
Love is the elixir which heals. Love offers dignity and connection and allows room for the most potent and challenging of reparations: forgiveness. Like a double-exposed photograph, the language in Arbor Vitae, "the tree of life," offers a delicate ribboning of shifting perspectives. The narration is activated as a witness, as consciousness is observed, and trespasses a "bare view" of a multilayered landscape. Here, a pensive topography of solitude and loss unfolds. This book-length pastoral poem seeks accountability and compassion for institutional and political trauma. Recent and historic human rights abuses merge to encompass a devastation that imprints the collective psyche. As Whitman writes, the scenery is the source: "the smallest sprout... goes onward and outward, nothing collapses." Arbor Vitae, in a dream state, from the shores of Guantanamo to the unfiltered "sun-burnished pines" of the multi-continental holocaust, seeks hope, seeks language as a root or a sapling that might break through the asphalt. Over amends for the disgrace of human rights abuses -voices merge in a textural elegiac for what might lift upward-unfurling leaves, harnessed, toward that one push into a great light.
