Forest

Poet and academic Dr David Kelly spent time with the forest paintings and wrote in direct response. What follows arrived unedited, in a single sitting.

The visual spacing is the poet's own — the intervals between lines echoing the intervals between trees.

What would the forest cry 
If a forest could cry out in a way that would make you know it were crying?

It would, I expect, cry out 
"I am forest" 
In the thick dialect of foliage 
The rich lexicon of leaf mould
Under the tongue of it.

Peat moss.

It might cry out. "I am forest. 
You may not enter".

Though gaps between trunks tell you otherwise.

Though the forest forbids you
It knows you will enter it anyway.

At first, 
You might think to push past its branches 
To muscle your way to the hinterland.

But where the thickets are welcoming, 
You brush past them lightly 
Surprised at soft dust of yellow and ochre 
Dusting your shoulder like pollen spores

Or smeared across it like the residue of sap.

Dazed you might stand and take stock: 
Look back at the threshold, down the fronds 
Of each thoroughfare you passed through.

"I am the forest"

That's what I would cry out anyway, 
If I were a forest

But I am misspoken. 
I am not even woodland.

Yet ache to my roots to be part of it 
As the roots of all trees move somewhere beyond and beneath.


— Dr. David Kelly

Thoughts

In this poem, the forest is given a voice that is both declarative and protective: it names itself—"I am forest"—as if identity is a boundary. The repeated self-naming feels like a warning and an invitation at once, suggesting that entering the forest is not simply physical trespass but a crossing into another language and order of being.

Kelly's diction turns ecology into speech: "thick dialect of foliage" and "rich lexicon of leaf mold" make the forest's 'words' material—soil, peat, sap, pollen. The poem implies that the forest communicates through texture and residue, leaving traces on the visitor's body. What you 'hear' is what clings to you. "Under the tongue of it" does particular work here — situating the forest's language not in utterance but in the wet, textured place before utterance. Peat moss follows as a kind of demonstration: the briefest possible line, noun without verb, as if enacting the very thing just described.

The speaker's movement shifts from force to attentiveness — and what is striking is that attentiveness is not chosen but overtaken. The initial impulse to "muscle" through gives way to brushing lightly, noticing dusting and smears, the speaker surprised by softness. That the ethical correction happens accidentally feels truer to how encounters with the natural world tend to work than a straightforward narrative of chosen care would be. The forest cannot be conquered without consequence, but it yields — on its own terms — to those who stop pressing.

The closing turn — "I am misspoken. I am not even woodland" — reframes the poem as longing rather than possession. The speaker aches to belong to the forest's underground continuity, where roots move somewhere beyond and beneath. Roots are already the forest's own form of reaching — perpetually moving without arriving. To ache toward that movement is to want to participate in a mode of being defined by incompletion and continuity. The forest becomes a figure for connection that is older, quieter, and more enduring than the human self.

Word and Image

The relationship between this poem and the paintings that generated it is unusually alive. The paintings do precisely what Kelly's poem describes experiencing: they forbid and invite simultaneously. The trunks assert themselves as verticals — structural, declarative, almost typographic — while the space between them dissolves into chromatic complexity that resists resolution. You cannot see through to a hinterland, yet the painting insists one exists. That is the visual equivalent of Kelly's line: "You may not enter / Though gaps between trunks tell you otherwise."

What Kelly picked up on, and transmuted into language, is the way Corr's surface operates as both representation and pure materiality at once. The cold wax texture means the paint has depth and residue — it accrues rather than depicts. Kelly's lines about "soft dust of yellow and ochre / Dusting your shoulder like pollen spores / Or smeared across it like the residue of sap" are not metaphor imported from elsewhere; they are a direct reading of the paint surface. He saw the medium's physical reality and understood it as an ecological truth.

The poem also inherits the painting's refusal to offer a single register. These paintings hold representation and abstraction in unresolved tension, which is where their power lives. Kelly's language operates the same way: the forest speaks in "dialect" and "lexicon," as if meaning is present but in a tongue just beyond full comprehension. Both works ask you to dwell at the threshold rather than cross it.

The works resonate with Kelly's closing image of roots moving "somewhere beyond and beneath." The nature of the forest is not withheld maliciously; it is structural — belonging to a deeper order of being that the painting gestures toward but, rightly, never fully discloses. Kelly understood that, and his poem honours it.

What the two works achieve together is something neither could alone: the paintings generate the felt experience of threshold and immersion; the poem gives that experience a voice that immediately acknowledges its own inadequacy to fully possess what it describes. The longing in Kelly's final lines — "I ache to my roots to be part of it" — is the longing of language before a painted surface that knows things words cannot carry.