Unruly Tree

The cryptic prompts—fragments, really—of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies unveil themselves to Leslie Ullman as rough translations from an obscure language. As an experiment, Ullman uses each one as a poem title, and in doing so she accesses a thrill of freedom, uncertainty, and propulsion beyond her own familiar patterns and landscapes. In the process, she finds herself exploring the literary, visual, and musical arts from angles that had never occurred to her before. Unruly Tree showcases the most successful of Ullman’s play, and the result is a marvelous work by a poet at the height of her craft. At its heart this book is about process itself—even when it applies to experiences outside the arts—and about reclaiming an inner freedom many of us lose in our lives as adults in these noisy, rancorous times.

“Unruly Tree is a joyful, searching book that pursues questions about the world of creativity and play. In conversation with the Oblique Strategies—a deck of cards created in 1975 by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt— Ullman’s collection is filled with curiosity, a desire to understand the thinking of other artists, and the beautiful uncertainties of the self.” – Jehanne Dubrow, author of Exhibitions: Essays on Art and Atrocity  

Little Soul and the Selves               

How does a spirit new to the world, baffled by the family domain and its customs, but above all curious, come to discover its essence? What does any child carry into the present from ancestors whose histories have been assimilated and long forgotten? These are the questions poet Leslie Ullman explores in her sixth collection. In the process, what at first appears to be a chronicle of a mid-century childhood through coming of age to maturity becomes an interrogation of the very nature of the soul—its origins, its purpose, its evolution in a given lifetime. To this end, the persona of Little Soul muses at the heart of the search. Introduced as a half-wild creature unbound by maleness or femaleness, tentative and weightless as “a lone firefly lacing the dusk,” Little Soul at first flounders alongside the untried Selves but eventually comes to instruct and fuse with them. Sometimes humorous and gently satirical in their depictions of a middle-class America whose values seemed unassailable, these poems reconstruct a personal history as they mull over the universal burdens of self-doubt, ambition, and inevitable relinquishments, and then taste the pleasures of traveling light.

In her poetic sequence, Little Soul and the Selves, Leslie Ullman offers a rich and rewarding commentary on the multiplicity of roles life demands of us and the undefinable, but felt, unity of consciousness that underlies them. To browse the list of poem titles alone is delicious: “Little Soul Remembers,” “Little Soul Comes Across Lines by George Seferis,” “The Selves Channel the Day the Parents Met,” “If Little Soul and the Selves Were a Rock Band… .” Playfully side-stepping the perils of direct philosophical inquiry, Ullman avoids the weighty “I” of confession and turns autobiography into a series of adventures, a profound questioning of human identity and the forces that tear at it. These are supple, athletic poems, full of the thisness of the world, touching lightly and with elegance on the larger questions. —Jean Nordhaus, Memos from the Broken World 

Library Of Small Happiness

Not since William Stafford’s quartet of meditations on the writing life has there been a book about the craft of poetry that is as ego-less, open-minded, intuitive, generous, encouraging, and just plain smart as Leslie Ullman’s Library Of Small Happiness. A hybrid collection of essays, writing exercises, and selections from her own poetry, it explores from many angles the mysterious process of entering what she calls the “sacred space” in which we both write and read poems. One of the many poems she discusses with feeling and insight along the way is Adrienne Rich’s “The Loser,” in which a man tells the woman he loved and lost that he envies her husband for getting to live “forever in a house lit by the friction of your mind.” Ullman’s book is just such a house, and every room in it is lit by the beautiful friction of her mind. Anyone who wishes to learn how to write poetry will want to live in its light forever. —David Jauss, Glossolalia: New and Selected Stories

Progress on the Subject of Immensity

"For over thirty years now, Leslie Ullman has steadily refined a poetry of the most acute and lyrically precise mindfulness, of what one of her poems calls the 'greater alertness.' This method has been forged in part by her ability to render the harsh beauties of the southwestern landscapes that have been her adopted home. More important still, however, is her almost shamanistic willingness to visit those liminal states between waking and dreaming, conventional reality and phantasm--states that sometimes offer menace, sometimes wonderment. This is all to say that Leslie Ullman is a poet of the first order, writing at the height of her very considerable powers."

David Wojahn, author of World Tree

Read more about Progress on the Subject of Immensity here.

The You That All Along Has Housed You: A Sequence

A so lovely book, though lovely is probably the wrong word, it is a tougher book than that. I felt it a very wise book, and am impressed at the quality of Leslie's attention, which felt inexhaustible. Reading it I felt envious of her deep connection to place, and how deftly that informs the poems, and how she always seems to know exactly what she's doing. Her writing seems to flow naturally at least that's the feel of the work the complete integration of the person and the life.

Karen Kevorkian, author of Lizard Dream and White Stucco Black Wing

Slow Work through Sand

For a number of years, Leslie Ullman has lived in the Southwest, on cultivated land, in the company of horses and with access to uncultivated desert. The seasons and conditions of this starkly appealing land have found their way into the poet and her work. In her poems there always seems to be someone who is making herself over from scratch. Ullman creates origins for herself in nature, in solitude, in animals, and of course through those aspects of human relationships that teach important lessons.