A Love Letter to Trees by Ada Limón

 

As a child, me and my brother we used to organise our summer lives around two old sour cherry trees. This is where we used to get together to plan our new adventure, where I´ve learn to be fearless, as nothing can be more fearful than climbing on the top of the trees on my own, and coming back safely, while spontaneously checking out the right lug. And there were other trees in my life: the beautiful pomegranate tree or the chestnut tree in Berlin I see from out of the window from my bed whose blowing make my heart beat excited for the coming of spring. I feel happy in forest surrounded by trees and there are the long walks through Berlin forests that helped me to catch up with my life and make a new one from the shreds of a painful past.

Shelter. A Love Letter to Trees by 24th US poet laureate Ada Limón is a poetic thread about the trees of her life. As a child, adult, writer, poet. Trees are memory items, who inspired her life and writings, who literally changed her life. It is not a ´natural science´ book, and Limón does not try to give them the materiality of the being. Instead, they are co-existing with humans, in their urban settings and surrounding their human habits and relationships. 

I particularly loved how natural all sounds, mainly not an ideological setting of any kind. It freely moves within the realm of words and there is nothing harder to achieve in terms of the strength of simplicity.

The short book - about one hour - is a Scribd Original production, series created by world famous authors for the book-sharing website, that I´ve featured on my blog on more than one occasion. 

Rating: 5 stars