By looking at the world on behalf of the world, [This One Tree] offers its poetry up as a self-portrait of the world. And with what new powers of description, powers that balance all the warring senses of this currently discredited activity of poetry by committing to the genius of place, of the scribe, and of ‘scribble, ’ or language itself. And with what visual command sponsored by what insistent powers of hearing, the senses at their beginning again as they, too, always were and always will be.

–William Olsen, from the foreword