Tree of Knowledge

Joan Mitchell said, When I talk about love, I mean loving a tree. When I talk about love, I mean loving where a tree used to be. In her roving new collection, Victoria Chang directs her generous, probing gaze to a range of subjects - most notably, Hilma af Klint - unified by Chang's crystalline poetic voice and her subtle use of reoccurring visual motifs. Across these poems, certain images - trees, a hanging figure, a branch, fingertips, a briefcase - resurface, like apparitions. Tree of Knowledge begins by circling around a potent, reoccurring image: the cutting of the limbs of a eucalyptus tree outside the poet's window. Echoes of the imagery of tree-cutting are refracted in an array of works of visual art, as this image becomes the locus from which the poems spiral out. As the book continues, we move from the personal to the historical, in a startling poem that takes the violent 1885 expulsion of Chinese Americans from Eureka as its subject. The poet then moves back to the ekphrastic, as the artist and mystic Hilma af Klint emerges as an interlocutor and 'fellow traveler' of sorts, sharing the poet's artistic and philosophical preoccupations: Af Klint becomes a model for a particular way of seeing and engaging with the world. Evocative, intricate, and deeply considered, Tree of Knowledge is in conversation with themes of Chang's previous work, but also casts its roots simultaneously deeper and farther afield, in its brilliant meditations on art, language, selfhood, memory, and loss.