The 2024 Penguin National Poetry Series winner has finally rolled off the presses, the judge (Maggie Millner) calling it a "startling original debut." There's nothing original about nature poems (we've been getting them for centuries now), especially tree poems, and Makshya Tolbert's Shade is a place is anything but startling. Tolbert's haibun are good examples of why quantitative verse is a failure in English haiku (using the word 'yield' in a haiku for its one syllable although it has two morae is one example). Meter, simile, and metaphor can sometimes justify bland simplicity, but in the absence of those three nothing rescues the poems here from their tedium. Not to say she doesn't attempt them, it's just that the efforts fall flat:
Unnaked, ginkgos
start knobbing out like lettuce
heads whorling fresh leaves
"I want to know shade and its properties," Tolbert says in one haibun. Her time in this contemplation of shade hasn't brought any new poetic insight, it's simply the contemplation of someone bored with nothing to do that afflicts Tolbert's work. Her poems are manner without motion.
Tolbert's semi-ravenous vocabulary comes off more like arborist jargon (mycelial, petioles, cambium, monocot) as if she's a Johnny Appleseed tossing words about and it suggests that she's a bit of a show off. Many poets find nature as irresistible as Tolbert does, and Tolbert shares the innocent awe that most nature poets do, not surprising for a debut collection of poetry. She is the chair of the Charlottesville Tree Commission ("The Tree Commission appoints me// out of an urgent need for diversity shade.") and she leads tour groups on walks through the Charlottesville Mall and also acts as something like a docent, taking questions from the groups. "Will we lose more trees? What is the weather you're working toward? Are curiosity and love the same thing?" That last question is likely a product of her imagination, or maybe she thought it would just sound nice shoehorned into the middle of a haibun. Like many in awe of nature, she believes the trees talk to her: "At the end of their lives, the trees,/ they tell me, Do not stay where you thin." That's thin, as in the thinning that trees do at the ends of their lives, from the poem "Eastbound" where Tolbert packs up and leaves California for Virginia.
Not all the poems here are about the Charlottesville Mall trees. Tolbert gives us a cento "Cuttings From Jena, Louisiana." The poem opens up "Could he and his friends sit// under the white tree". It was a question from a male black freshman at Jena High School to the school's principal. The tree was a hangout spot for white students in the schoolyard, typically the black students hung out at the bleachers near the school auditorium. The principal told the student he could sit anywhere he wanted, and at first break he and his friends sat under the tree. The next day nooses were found dangling from one of the trees branches. Soon afterward, on December 4, 2006, six black teenagers attacked and beat a white student, Justin Barker. The six teenagers were initially charged with attempted murder, which many Jena residents thought was an excessive charge. (In fact Barker was discharged from the hospital hours after the beating and even attended a school dance that night.) The six teenagers became known as the Jena Six. All six were eventually convicted of aggravated battery and conspiracy to commit aggravated battery. The tree in the schoolyard was cut down. Tolbert dedicated her cento to seven people and the tree. The seventh person was the mother of one of the Jena Six, Caseptla Bailey, who said, "Cutting down that beautiful tree won't solve the problem at hand."
Sadness pervades Shade is a place. That's of course nothing unusual, sadness and poetry are bosom buddies. In "Shade walk: a haibun" Tolbert writes "Jorie says it best: 'I was always just sadness.'" Is all this sadness really warranted though? According to Nation of Change magazine 1,836 US counties out of 3,119 experienced growth in tree cover between 2000 and 2020. Some of those were counties with large densely populated urban areas like Kings County, New York, Broward County, Florida, and Wayne County, Michigan. The Jorie she was referring to is Jorie Graham and the line is from Graham's poem "Fog" that appeared in London Review of Books in June of 2022. Of course Graham exaggerates her sadness like a lot of poets do. She was undoubtedly overjoyed when her boyfriend and future husband, Peter Sacks, won the 1999 University of Georgia Contemporary Poet Series. (Jorie Graham was the lead contest judge that year.)
Critic Jeffrey Levine writing for Southern Humanities Review in February of 2026 said of Shade is a place: "This is a debut of remarkable ethical coherence and quiet daring." The insipid plainness in Shade is anything but daring and there's nothing here to corrode the reader's boredom. There's no invention and very little wordplay (she does somewhat awkwardly wedge krummholz into one poem); Tolbert tests herself too little and congratulates herself too much. Every nature poet accepts the irony of advocating for tree conservation with verse written on pulped trees; W.S. Merwin's 1988 poetry collection The Rain in the Trees is still in print today. Tolbert's getting her career started off with a bang—winning a major publisher's contest means she will be avoiding the toiling in obscurity that most poets initially go through. There's definitely been worse American haiku written than what we have here, but she's prematurely bestowed herself with the title "haibuneer." Let's wait and see what her sophomore collection looks like first.
