"Tree of Life: A Review of Maureen Alsop's 'Arbor Vitae' by Taylor Ramcharitar

Love and war are both terribly chaotic and defiantly cohesive and, in Arbor Vitae (Nauset Press, 2023) by Maureen Alsop, that is exactly the case. This book is entirely one poem that deals with institutional and political trauma — confronts it head on — while narrating everything beautifully. As the title suggests, the “tree of life” is beautiful but also destructive and signals the hope that remains after all that is lost. Each page holds dreamy descriptions and left me wanting to continue on, despite the difficult events unfolding in the pages. The poem in its structure is light and flowy but is juxtaposed against the darker themes that are being explored, which felt new and interesting to me.
Alsop teaches online with the Poetry Barn and is a Book Review Editor and Associate Poetry Editor at Poemeleon. She holds an MFA from Vermont College and is also the author of Tender to Empress, Pyre, Mirror Inside Coffin, Mantic, Apparition Wren, and many chapbooks, including Sweetwater Ardour, Nightingale Habit, and the dream and the dream you spoke. Her poem “Year of the Hare” is featured in MORIA Literary Magazine’s Issue 12.
Arbor Vitae was released in October of 2023. From the first few pages, that dreamy environment and tone of the book is established: “Love is not always beautiful / and not / this love on this hour on this earth / I think of you at first light.” The person whose perspective we are hearing from captures the whole essence of the book: love is complicated and often painful, but we still look for it anyway. To really get this across, lines such as “You don’t have to know emptiness to know / the body’s wound / The sun fell the first day after the war / neither peace nor loneliness was buried / beneath the earth” make an intense emotional impact. The way the traumatic descriptions are displayed and conveyed still allows for an enjoyable reading experience.
As a reader, I flowed through this book, which sent me through a wave of emotions, as I immersed myself deeper and deeper into the narrative the same way the roots of an old tree do. The density of the content, the quantity of words written on each page, and the spaces between the lines all correlate and vary as the narrative unfolds, providing a reading experience unlike anything I have ever seen. This poem is insightful and shocking, blanketing lush, natural descriptions with the tense contents we are exploring, creating a unique reading experience. This has everything to do with Alsop’s writing style and techniques, where she balances these different elements and weaves them together.
As someone who has dealt with loss and the way it affects your every being, reading this book-length poem was eye-opening and special: “I will not close my heart to language. The waters / which connect me to symbol. Phrase by phrase / to grandmothers and fathers so far past.” Alsop depicts multiple sources of pain and shines a light on them, leaving you with no other feeling but love.

Taylor Ramcharitar

Taylor Ramcharitar was born and raised in Los Angeles and is currently studying animation. When she is not drawing, she is reading one of her many books at home and thinking about traveling.