ELDAR AKHADOV For Richard Berengarten, author of the monumental poem ‘Tree’* Artillery shots. Foxtrot sounds. Villages and ancient manuscripts burn. And only the tree outside the window keeps waiting. Whenever you glance at it The mind darkens. Ice crumbles. A…
LUCY HAMILTON Rings In memory of my father, John Plowright A tree is thick − or thin – skinned, its sap carries sugar to leaves, feeds new cells, infuses roots with energy and the cambium – almost invisible – is…
RICHARD BERENGARTEN Twelve propositions Our words inspiration, respiration and spirit all have a common origin in the Latin verb spirare ‘to breathe’. We breathe involuntarily and necessarily. The air we depend on for life itself surrounds the earth like a…
SILVIA PIO (edited by) The Albero Project, published by Margutte, is a multilingual translated project based on Richard Berengarten’s poem, TREE. Translations of the poem into ten languages appear here. The project has now been enriched by a new work of…
RICHARD BERENGARTEN I wrote Tree in Cambridge, 1979, at the age of thirty-five. Much of the poem’s direct inspiration came from Ann Waldman’s chant-poem, Fast Speaking Woman,[1] which she based in large part on her researches into women’s customs in…
RICHARD BERENGARTEN Twelve propositions [1] 1. TREE is a chant poem that sings the tree. As a tree itself is a harp that plays itself by itself in and on the wind, so TREE plays on and along the human voice…
RICHARD BERENGARTEN Twelve propositions 1. The word anthology often means a ‘collection of poems’. This usage blends two ideas: a ‘gathering of flowers’ and a ‘gathering of extracts from writings’.[1] In other words, an anthology is conceived as a kind…
