Jack Pine is a book of poetry for children by Christopher Patton, illus. by Cybele Young (Groundwood, 2007). It is about the Jack Pine (Pinus banksiana), an ubiquitous member of the pine tree family, seen in most parts of boreal Canada and the northern U.S. It’s a gutsy, spindly, tenacious tree, that is hardy but not of particular use to humans. As Patton speaks of the unlovely qualities of the tree, he adds “What matters more than all of this –/ he’s useless. Just useless. No good/for lumber, ships, shingles, or crates./Useless!” But this is not entirely true. The Jack pine has another name. It is often called the ‘nurse tree’ and slowly through the book, the poet reveals this inner quality of the tree.
Cybele Young’s wonderful “illustrations” are a bit of a misnomer since they were originally three dimensional collages of etched paper. The etchings show the Jack Pine in its various states of being — as a seedling or fully grown, juxtaposed against some of the settings where the tree is found. Other varieties of pine like the white and red pines, are also displayed and written about. The array of juxtaposed etched images convey a sense of the dynamic range of the Jack Pine in both setting and poetic ’story.’
Jack Pine felt to me to be a very Canadian poetry book, celebrating a tree most Canadians know well, having seen them from off the highway or in the woods and near farms. When I was young, our family used to go hunting for matsutake mushrooms in the Rockies, and it was under the loose sandy soils where the lodgepole pines (a close relation to the Jack Pine) thrive, that some of the best mushrooms could be found. For us a stand of these particularly ‘useless’ pines was a sign of treasure for what they ‘nursed’ below!
This week Poetry Friday host is Patricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect.