Touch Wood
by James Dott
Touch Wood is a lyric field guide to trees. Each poem is an ember coaxed to flame to light a path toward a deeper understanding of trees and our kinship with them. The short life and tragic death of David Douglas, early North American botanist, threads through the collection. Touch Wood’s poems are elegies, narratives, and meditations on our tangled histories. Touch wood, learn the roots and truths of the trees of the Pacific Northwest.
Date of Publication: 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9991654-0-4
Pages: 90
Size: 6” x 9”
Price: $25.00 (price includes shipping in the Continental USA)
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Excerpt
An excerpt from "Naming the Tree" Douglas-fir—Pseudotsuga menziesii
2000 BCE/ 2000 CE
Your logs, smoothed and bleached by your drifting years,
washed up on beaches in Hawaii,
were split and burned, chopped and carved
into long, double-hulled, dugout canoes.
Few old growth groves remain,
few new stands will reach their age.
Clear-cut replaced wildfire to open forests for your young.
Investors demand returns on shorter terms than centuries.
What shall we call you where two or three or more of you are gathered?
A copse, a stand, a grove, unit in a tree farm, a community of chlorophyll and lignin?
A congregation—rooted, reaching toward light, ready to burn?
About James Dott
James Dott is the son of a geologist and a naturalist who kindled his love of nature and natural history. He was born in Eugene, Oregon and grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. He began writing poetry and fiction at an early age. After retiring from elementary school teaching James was able to dive deeper into writing. He poetry and prose have appeared in local and online journals. He is the author of several chapbooks and two poetry collections, A Glossary of Memory and Another Shore. James and his family live in Astoria, Oregon above the Columbia River.
Advance Praise for Touch Wood
You will experience this book as a field guide that begins to sing, a history that grows lyric, a spell peopled with tree creatures who voice their secrets. In this narrative studded with detail, this field study told in scenes, there is a precision of language applied to elemental mysteries of the wild. Dott uses terms pulled from geology, landscape, and the animal body to delineate the structure of trees, always tending toward the elemental. His book offers you a forest of words—dense, fragrant, and alive.
—Kim Stafford, author of As the Sky Begins to Change
In these Touchwood poems, James Dott not only marvels with early naturalist David Douglas at the keystone trees of the Pacific Northwest, but also creates a gracious ecology of woven words.
—Jack Nisbet, author of The Collector and David Douglas: A Naturalist at Work