Naked Trees
Netherlandic Press [1990]
ISBN: 0-919417-20-5
available from the author
Wolsak and Wynn [2012]
ISBN: 978-1-894987-65-3
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Naked Trees is a meditation on urban trees. It explores the life and death of these trees and the people who live with them. We see the trees through the eyes of a child, who finds her tree friendly and inviting, or view the tree’s life through the thoughts of a leaf, promised flight, but denied it by the capricious wind. Terpstra finishes the collection with a section on varieties, composed of poems on individual tree types such as prunus serotina and utility pole.
Barbara Myers writes (“Walking Around Writing” Arc Poetry Magazine 70 [winter, 2013]) “Terpstra identifies with trees […], losing himself in his subject just as Keats advised. His prose poems are so lyrical that the notion of lines begins to seem like an over-refinement that would add nothing but preciousness and unwanted artifice to the clarity of his compositions. […] For all its reverence and appeals to the tree-huggers among us, the thrust of the collection is clear-headed in also describing the uses of trees as wood […]. Whether in use, in admiration, or in cataloguing, it’s hard to resist Terpstra’s unabashed enthusiasm for his subject.”
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courtesy Arc Poetry Magazine 70
Sue Sorensen (Prairie Fire Review of Books , Vol. 13, No. 1 [2013]) “These delicate ruminations are reverent but never sentimental, and their manner is, odd as it may sound, elaborately plain. The subject of tree keeps the poet intensely focused and […] rooted; at the same time he allows himself to range and wonder, to be awestruck and fanciful.”
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courtesy Prairie Fire Review of Books
Phil Thompson (The Chronicle Herald, 22 July, 2012) “If you are lucky to live in a well-treed urban environment, get out the hammock and find two big trees in a park, public garden or friend’s backyard and read Naked Trees on a summer afternoon. According to Terpstra, the trees will know you are there. And they will remember.”
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