Poems in this collection have been called thorny. The word is apt because it describes the hardscrabble landscape that provides the setting of many of them, but not all. In A Forest for the Trees, we are exposed to many landscapes, from the playas of southwest Texas to the mountains of Glacier Park. What holds them together is some sense of commitment to land, water, and trees, to the landscapes of a past before sawmills and oil derricks. To these, and to the folk who did and do the work of replacing the forests removed for the benefit of capital. “The Commissioners’ Friends” brings the two together:

Deep pocket developers still deflect
every challenge from our loose coalition
we named Valley River Advocates
to mock their planned Valley River Estates
clearing another eighty-eight acres
along the river’s more rolling north bank
where the county scrapped the plan to create
hiking trails and a nature preserve.

Milton Jordan has worked as a school teacher, social worker, lumber grader, and preacher. Now retired, he lives with Anne Elton Jordan in Georgetown, Texas. He is the author or editor of twelve books encompassing history and culture, as well as several volumes of poetry.

His chapbook, The Amberman Poems, is from Kallisto Gaia Press which also published the anthology, No Season for Silence: Texas Poets and Pandemic that Milton edited. Stephen F. Austin State University published his collection, What the Rivers Gather, in 2020. Milton has also published poems, essays, reviews, and stories in numerous literary journals and magazines, going back over fifty years, when his first published poem appeared in the Texas Observer. 

Several poems in this collection first appeared in Texas Poetry Assignment, including “The Commissioner’s Friends,” “Lift Every Voice,” “A Favorite Highway,” and “Cartographers.”

For more on this collection: https://bwpress.org/?page_id=337