Seeing the Trees and the Woods

Seeing the Trees and the Woods anthology cover

Last autumn, 2025, Kuli Kohli and I edited and published an anthology of poetry about trees for Offa’s Press: Seeing the Trees and the Woods.

We followed the preparatory path we’d taken for our successful Away with the Birds and ran a dozen or so workshops across the region in a variety of locations including the River Severn bank at Bridgnorth, Mary Stevens park, Stourbridge, West Park in Wolverhampton, Cannock Chase and Handsworth park in Birmingham.

Around 120 poets attended those workshops and we found that few of the urban poets actually knew the names of the trees. This was a surprise but reflects the worrying disconnect between many ‘city folk’ and nature. It wasn’t the case with the countryside workshops we organised where ‘tree knowledge’ was evident and willingly shared.

When it came to the editing process we were concerned that we’d get dozens of poems about oaks, silver birches and Christmas trees and outrage about the recently felled ‘Sycamore Gap’ tree. We did gets scores of such poems, out of the 450 or so entries, but some were so good they became the outstanding poems in the collection.

I’d like to give a special mention to Olga Dermott-Bond’s ‘At Hexham post office, September 28, 2023’ which brilliantly recounts the posting off of sycamore cuttings to be grown on; Steve Harrison’s ‘Revenge of the Acorns’ that shows how slyly nature works, Carol Howarth’s gorgeous ‘Maple Sugaring, Québec, 1977’ and Kuli’s own hilarious ‘Cretan Lemon Chickens’, all of which became firm favourites at the readings from the anthology that followed.

But a list of favourite poems would take up the rest of this blog so I’ll just say that we enjoyed the editing and, again, found agreement on nearly everything.

I should mention one of the most unusual aspects of the anthology, and we were very often surprised by what had been submitted, was the high number of poems by South Asian women. Seven of them finally made their way into the anthology which suggests that nature and ‘trees’, specifically, are more valued in the cultures of the sub-continent, from the Punjab to Bangladesh.

And I’d like to say a huge thank you to the librarians who accommodated us for some of the happiest readings I’ve organised in years: at Oswestry, Shropshire, Penn, Wolverhampton, Stourbridge and Church Stretton. Other readings took place, of course, but something wonderful happens when local people turn out in good numbers to hear their local poets reading poems about trees.

When it came to production Kuli did the design work, brilliantly, if I may say so, and I provided the photos for the front cover. Each of these photos relates to some aspect of a poem in the collection and were taken over a period of 2 years, knowing they’d come in handy. One of the photos was taken in Sicily, some years before, no prizes for guessing which one!

We’ve had a number of very positive reviews and especially insightful comments from Jeff Phelps, one of the contributors, and Alan Ross, an old friend of mine, from university days, who’s a retired librarian living in Essex.

The book is selling well and is available from Waterstones, Wolverhampton, and a number of small independent booksellers across the region. If you want to get hold of a copy quickly, then go to the ‘shop’ page on Offa’s website and make an order: www.offaspress.co.uk/shop