Tree Spirits Grass Spirits

Hiromi Ito’s Tree Spirits Grass Spirits, beautifully translated by Jon L Pitt, is my new favorite book. Maybe my old favorite too. Because I feel like I have, all along, been dreaming about it: a travelogue into the intimate relationship—and the sympathetic oblivion—between the changeless yet always changing world of plants, the always changing yet changeless mind of a poet, and the nature of their disappearance into each other’s spirits.

…Ito’s insightful prose addresses the connective space between the human and the more-than-human world. In her delicate style, full of wonder and memory, Ito’s botanical world becomes meaningfully entangled with preciousness and resiliency that may offer a clue to the common fate of all life on earth.

Tree Spirits, Grass Spirits enchanted me. Ito’s prose, in Pit’s translation, is vivid, precise, and wholly sensory. This is nature writing at its most evocative, and is vitally engaged with the world.