To "advance beyond habit." To choose "immersion." To write something that is "an entrance" to the landscape it encloses. I was interested in this generous or ethical idea of a book as a place you might be welcomed into, like a "refuge." I was also very moved by the book as [a] site of immutual "encounters" that aren’t, always or necessarily, productive or easily explored. "This wants not to be a strong narrative," writes Hazel White, but also "real work is hospitality." Lines like these are part of my on-going admiration for White's beautiful, thoughtful poetry.—Bhanu Kapil
Hazel White’s perfectly poised diction hangs in distilled suspension, capturing the exact atmosphere of this arid southern California garden, with its sense of endless air sifted by endless light. She evokes the play of pale grey-greens and silver-beiges, colors of the wind and sun, echoing the care with which innovative landscape architect Isabelle Greene positioned every detail. White doesn’t describe the garden, but rather invokes it through a parallel gardening of language, arranging living elements so that they live beyond themselves. The whole is a thriving testament to growth as community.—Cole Swensen
"Wide-eyed aerial aspect into fields of nurture. Urgently, I went.” And we readers also go urgently into these poems, which regard Isabelle Greene’s process of making a garden. But the making of this boook-length poem is also its own subject, “not leaving any part of itself behind.” Like the Valentine garden, it continually occludes its own grandeur by pushing the garden forward, into the reader’s mind. And yet in the end the constructions the poet take us to positions from which grace becomes visible: a spaciousness of engagement—of love—which is both breathtaking and breath-giving, inspiration itself.—Bin Ramke
Hazel White’s remarkable Vigilance Is No Orchard plunges us into “the heat of meeting” landscape architect Isabelle Greene and her iconic Valentine garden. It is a devotion—vovere, vow—vigil, awake—and committed—committere, to bring together—and White plumbs each of these states to its existential root. But she never shies away from the messiness of attachment, and renders its somatic complexity with rare and subtle exactitude. “A body pursuing a claim,” she writes, “churns a frenzy of orientation.” An immersion in the passionate response to another artist’s vision and the enactment of a hard-won detachment from it: in holding this duality so artfully, Vigilance Is No Orchard models a fully embodied ethics truly devoted, vigilant, and committed to being in mindful relation.—Brian Teare