Description
Book SynopsisIn Vigilance Is No Orchard, Hazel White records her haunting romance with the Valentine Garden, created by landscape architect Isabelle Greene in the foothills of Santa Barbara, California. Jealous of its maker’s power to affect a dynamic experience of space, White tries to make language play faithfully in the game coursing between the body and Greene’s fiercely stirring landscape. Both the poems and the constructed landscape they describe are complex and explorative, never simplified. Instead their interests are survival, forage and repair, the act of making, accumulation and overflow that results in flowering and eventually gives way to loss. Praise for Hazel White: “I set this book down and wept…It is the most beautiful piece of writing I have read in many years.”—Bhanu Kapil
Trade Review"Exquisitely alert to the realities of natural environments, White’s book is among the most interesting of the new nature writing."—Publishers Weekly
"White’s is a book on building, unbuilding, collecting and assembling, articulating how language, structures and gardens are constructed, both naturally and artificially."—rob mclennan's blog
"I was interested in this generous or ethical idea of a book as a place you might be welcomed into, like a ‘refuge.’ I was also very moved by the book as [a] site, also, of immutual ‘encounters’ that aren’t, always or necessarily, productive or easily explored. ‘This wants not to be a strong narrative,’ writes Hazel White, deep in her project of place, Vigilance Is No Orchard. But also: '…real work is hospitality.’"—Bhanu Kapil
"Hazel White’s perfectly poised diction hangs in distilled suspension, capturing the exact atmosphere of this arid southern California garden, with its sense of endless air sifted by endless light. She evokes the play of pale grey-greens and silver-beiges, colors of the wind and sun, echoing the care with which innovative landscape architect Isabelle Greene positioned every detail. White doesn’t describe the garden, but rather invokes it through a parallel gardening of language, arranging living elements so that they live beyond themselves. The whole is a thriving testament to growth as community."—Cole Swensen
"'Beginning over, in Greene’s miniature agriculture. Wide-eyed aerial aspect into fields of nurture. Urgently, I went.' And we readers also go, urgently, into these poems which regard Isabelle Green’s four year process of making a garden. But the making of this poem is also its own subject, 'not leaving any part of itself behind.' Hazel White notes that 'real work is hospitality,' and so this book-length poem, like the Valentine garden, continually occludes its own grandeur (and it is a grand proposition, this book) by pushing the garden forward, into the reader’s mind. And yet in the end the constructions the poet take us to positions from which largeness and grace become visible. There is a spaciousness of engagement—of love—in this poetry which is both breathtaking and a kind of breath-giving, inspiration itself."—Bim Ramke
"Hazel White’s remarkable Vigilance Is No Orchard plunges us into 'the heat of meeting' landscape architect Isabelle Greene and her iconic Valentine garden. It is a devotion—vovere, vow—vigil, awake—and committed—committere, to bring together—and White plumbs each of these states to its existential root. But she never shies away from the messiness of attachment, and renders its somatic complexity with rare and subtle exactitude. 'A body pursuing a claim,' she writes, 'churns a frenzy of orientation.' An immersion in the passionate response to another artist’s vision and the enactment of a hard-won detachment from it: in holding this duality so artfully, Vigilance Is No Orchard models a fully embodied ethics truly devoted, vigilant, and committed to being in mindful relation."—Brian Teare
