A many-layered and deeply spiritual collection celebrating the landscape of the northern Pacific coast.
Editors Nelson, Wirth, and MacWilliam present a collection of poetry and prose from the Pacific Northwest.
“Cascadia” has long been used as a poetic nickname for the Pacific Northwest, including the states of Washington and Oregon and the Canadian province of British Columbia. The designation speaks not only to the shared cultural and political affinities of the region but also to the common landscape of rainy temperate forests and lush river valleys that sit in the shadow of the Cascade Range. This anthology explores the connection of that region to a particular philosophical disposition found among some of its inhabitants—Zen Buddhism. It isn’t as random a pairing as it may initially sound, given Cascadians’ long-standing fascination with both Eastern philosophy and their own natural environment. Poet Andrew Schelling describes the relationship in his foreword: “Ecology, conservation biology, cybernetics, rewilding; these sciences brought refinement to the longstanding Buddhist question: whether such a thing as a separate living creature even exists, apart from an ecosystem of energy exchange, geomorphic forces, weather, and food chains.” The kinship of every organism, whether or not it is appreciated or acknowledged, is a recurrent theme in the collection, as when Daphne Marlatt writes in her piece “full spectrum eye appeal” of “sea cuke’s moptop licking its / tentacle chops we forget / underwater gastronomy / its delicate clarity of interception, inter- / connection lost // to the dry suit beings we are…” Some pieces acknowledge the ways in which the landscape reflects back cosmological patterns like death and rebirth, as in Mushim Patricia Ikeda’s “heart sūtra fragment 5”: “mountains and rivers / creeks, spillways, marshes, sloughs // trickledowns and whitewaters / gravity is impersonal / we all return to ground // but tonight I think rebirth / is simply this: from these small vessels, our bodies // we naturally overturn and spill out / into vastness and return…”
The anthology succeeds in collecting work representing the various traditions that inform its mission. Beat poets Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure are included here, as are poets Jane Hirshfield and Tess Gallagher (more surprising, but no less welcome, is Denise Levertov). There are translators of Asian poetry, including Red Pine and Schelling (who also contributes a few original poems), as well as Indigenous poets such as Rena Priest and Wedlidi Speck. In “Bardo,” Alicia Hokanson memorably compares flying over the landscape to the Buddhist notion of the bardo: “our small plane hums // over the lightly ruffled waves / of island waters // all the grays above / and all the greens below // torn heaven / stitched earth // and we, rent creatures, / suspended in between…” Interspersed among the poems are relevant essays, as well as photographs and other artwork. Most of the writers have contributed several pieces, allowing the reader to get a sense of each contributor’s spiritual and aesthetic ecosystem. The volume makes for a wonderfully fertile collection, with ideas and voices mingling seamlessly in a way that does indeed summon the natural wonders of Cascadia.
A many-layered and deeply spiritual collection celebrating the landscape of the northern Pacific coast.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798890742780
Page Count: 215
Publisher: Watershed Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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