FORESTS

A poetic salute to the world’s forests and many of the wonders they contain.

The beauty and visual depth that inform Chock’s stately forest scenes, rich in color and photographically exact in detail, find suitable echoes in Beckerman’s alliterative, sensual free verse. “Munching mouthfuls of bursting blueberries, / you inhale fertile earth while hunting for / morels and fairy circles.” The tour begins in a misty temperate forest, then branches out to encompass other forest types and locales, from lush Amazonian rain forest to oyamel firs hung about with migrant monarch butterflies in a “tangerine dream,” a stand of Japanese bamboo dappled with swirls of sunlight, an urban forest, and even an underwater kelp forest with a drowsy otter nosing through. In prose commentary running beneath, the author clearly describes each type and, for specific sites, what makes each distinctive. Along the way, she fills readers in on the ways wildlife, trees, and fungi interact, as well as on the effects and increasing dangers of wildfires; in the backmatter she offers useful guidelines for planting trees and conserving shrinking woodlands. “So much to see,” she writes, “to smell, / to hear, / to taste, / to feel.” Small human figures appear occasionally, but typically in silhouette or facing away from viewers.

A spellbinding tour, deeply rooted in both fact and feeling.