NEW AND RECOMMENDED READINGL: 2010 2009 2008

What the editors have been reading or stumbled across recently.

DECEMBER 2008

• Though obviously the literary relationships between man and nature are our preoccupation here at H&W, we are open and interested in the ways new media pick up the theme. A title out from Pocketwatch Games, Venture Artic, invites the player to "Harness the forces of sun, wind, and snow in icy lands where wolves roam the tundra and orcas patrol the seas." With a free download demo for Windows or Mac! Reminds one of the good times had once upon a time ago, long about '96 it was, with peccarries and cannibals found along the Amazon Trail. NB: Readers interested in playing this game can email the editors to be sent a free download link!
• The Dream We Carry: selected and last poems of Olav Hauge. Copper Canyon Press, 2008. Bilingual edition of the Norwegian poet who earned his living as a farmer and gardener in the fjord reigon of western Norway.
• The Rock Crystal, by Adalbert Stifter. Translated by Marianne Moore and Elizaeth Mayer, introduction by W.H.Auden. New York Review books classics, 2008. W. H. Auden: "a quiet and beautiful parable about the relation of people to places, of man to nature." Reviewed in the The New York Sun (to which excellent publication we bid a sorry farewell!).
• The Oysters of Locmariaquer, by Eleanor Clark. Ecco Press, 1998.
• Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, edited by Keith Christiansen and Pierre Rosenberg. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008.

NOVEMBER 2008

• Reign of Snakes by Robert Wrigley. $18.00 from Penguin, 1999. Wrigley’s poetry about the animals, plants, and people of the Midwest is thoughtful and unsentimental.
• Carolina Ghost Woods: Poems by Judy Jordan. $16.95 from Louisiana State University Press, 2000. In her first collection of poetry, Jordan conjures a self-contained wintry world.
• Nature Revealed: Selected Writings, 1949-2006 by E.O Wilson. $35.00 from Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. A collection of articles and scientific papers by one of the country’s most revered living biologists.
• Egg & Nest by Rosamond Purcell. $39.95 from Belknap Press, 2008. Purcell’s beautiful photography of rare and common eggs makes this history of egg-collecting a rare pleasure.
• Nature’s Beloved Son: Rediscovering John Muir’s Botanical Legacy by Bonnie J. Gisel. $45.00 from Heyday Books, 2008. Environmental historian Gisel provides a thorough portrait of Muir.

OCTOBER 2008

• The Passionate Gardener, by Rudolf Borchardt, translated by Henry Martin. McPherson, 2006. Reviewed in Third Coast by Diether Haenicke.
• The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Picador, 2007. If humans disappeared tomorrow, which man-made objects disipate quickly, and which last for millions of years.
• Tree of Life web project. Very technical and many parts unfinished, but still a good sources for detailed, illustrated articles and references.
• The Ancestor’s Tale, by Richard Dawkins. Mariner books, 2005. Reverse-chronology of evolution, taking its titles from the Canterbury tales. Also recommended is River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (Basic Books, 1996).
• Life, A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth, by Richard Fortey (Vintage, 1999). Narrative on evolution following the planet’s timetable. The author loves quoting from Yeats and Browning, and incorporates Lewis Carroll’s "Hunting of the Snark" and Edward Lear’s wonderful poems of nonsense botany.

SEPTEMBER 2008

• The Tracks We Leave: Poems on Endangered Wildlife of North America, by Barbara Hyett (University of Illinois Press, 1996).
• Poet Tess Taylor reviews, and recommends, two books by Kathleen Jamie in the July/August 2008 issue of Boston Review: Waterlight: Selected Poems and Findings: Essays on the Natural and Unnatural World, both from Graywolf (2007).
• Nature, Landscape, and Building for Sustainability, a new reader from Harvard Design Magazine edited by William S. Saunders (University of Minnesota press, 2008).
• The Great Minnesota Fish Book, by Tom Dickson, features full-color illustrations by Joseph Tomelleri. According to the winning blurb from the University of Minnesota Press, this is a book "for everyone from the passionate angler to the up-north cabin dweller ... conveys the love and fascination -- and in the case of eelpout, the disdain -- that people have for the fishes of our home state." From University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
• The 102nd issue of Granta, summer 2008, features a collection of essays representing "The New Nature Writing."
• In Rescuing the Spectacled Bear, British comedian and actor Stephen Fry tells us how he tried to rescue this endangered Peruvian ursine. From Hutchinson, 2003.
• In American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree, author Susan Freinkel gives an account of the history, ecology, and potential recovery of this characteristic American species (University of California Press, 2007). David Vandermast reviews the book at American Scientist.
• In her seventh collection, First Hand, Linda Bierds picks up once again the themes of science and natural history which have drawn so many admiring readers (Putnam, 2004). Reviewed for Blackbird by Susan Settlemyre Williams.
• Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West by Deanne Stillman (Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
• Contributor Matt Nienow recommends The Future of Nature from Milkweed Editions, another collection of essay from Orion magazine (2007)

AUGUST 2008

• In Tim Bowling’s The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture, the author recalls his hometown in British Columbia, the salmon that sustained their industry and spirit, and fishing trips with his father. From the book: “As a boy, I learned three things from the salmon that would greatly influence my understanding of life: the knowledge of man is limited and even miniscule in the face of the natural world; death is not an aberration to shut our eyes and minds against; and, rich patterns exist everywhere.” Gibsons Landing: Nightwood Editions, 2007. Robyn Read has an excellent review in The Goose.
• Planetary, a community blog sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, provides a space for its contributors to discuss the teaching of “the environmental humanities.”
• James Engelhardt writes ecopoetry and about ecopoetics and his life as a “water poet” at River of Play.
• Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. “Gardens he describes modestly as an essay, but it has, or at least suggests, the same kind of pervasive presence of an underlying human impulse in our relation to the world around us.” -- W. S. Merwin
• The Times Literary Supplement reviews the New Naturalist series (Harper Collins, 1945-present); our recommendation is that you buy the entire series.
• The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought, by Robert J. Richards. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Richards re-examines Haeckel’s importance in popularizing Darwinian thought.
• Finding Home: Writing on Nature and Culture, edited by Peter Sauer. Boston: Beacon Street Press, 1992. An anthology of essays selected from the first decade of Orion Magazine.
• The End of the Wild, by Stephen M. Meyer. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. The sharp decline of biodiversity is brought into perspective.
• Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River, by Alice Albinia. London: John Murray Publishers, 2008. Albinia takes the reader through a history of the Indus river.
• Under Open Sky: Poets on William Cullen Bryant. Fordham University Press, 1986. A collection of writings, editing by Nobert Krapf, about the first important American nature poet.
• Songs for the Songs of Birds, a recording of a selection of poems chosen and read by Don McKay, on the theme of birds, birding and flight. Published by Rattling Books.
• "Sea Stars: A Galaxy at Our Feet", an extract from Barbara Hurd's Walking the Wrack Line (University of Georgia Press, 2008). An essay about "beholding a miracle as the world grinds the living into debris." Published in the May/June 2008 issue of Orion Magazine.

JULY 2008

• Three collections of essays by Barbara Hurd: Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains; Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination; and Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling through the Dark (all University of Georgia Press, 2008)
• Windfall, a journal of "poetry of place" (founded in 2002, now in 12th issue)
• The Meadow by James Galvin (Owl Books, 1993)
• Field Folly Snow by Cecily Parks (University of Georgia Press, 2008)
• Working the Woods, Working the Sea: An Anthology of Northwest Writing edited by Finn Wilcox and Jerry Gorsline (Empty Bowl Press, 2008)
• Engaging With Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe edited by Barbara Hanawalt and Lisa Kiser (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008)
• Interpretative Work: Poems by Elizabeth Bradfield (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2008)
• “Pastures of Plenty: Woody Guthrie and the Columbia River dams" by Matt Rasmussen (Orion Magazine, July/August 2008). As Rasmussen looks at the Columbia River dam, he wonders what folksinger Guthrie, who originally praised the dams in the 1940’s, would think of the now diminished river, its stagnant water and decreased salmon population.
• The Wild Trees by Richard Preston (Random House, 2007)

JUNE 2008

• Back on the Fire: Essays by Gary Snyder (Counterpath, 2008)
• Wild Apples, a new journal devoted to “art, nature and inquiry” (2008)
• Butterfly Eyes and Other Secrets of the Meadow, children’s verse by Joyce Sidman with illustrations by Beth Krommes (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
• Migration: New and Selected Poems by W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)
• Woodlands by naturalist Oliver Rackham, published as the 100th volume in Collins’ “New Naturalist” series (2006)
• A Coast of Trees by A.R. Ammons (Norton, 1981, reissued 2002)
• Wild Animals I Have Known, by Ernest Thompson Seton, was originally published by Charles Scribner & Sons in 1912, and is now available from reprint publisher Yesterday’s Classics. Also offered are several titles by Clara Dillingham Pierson, including Among the Pond People, originally published by E.P. Dutton & Co. in 1901 with illustrations by F.C. Gordon.
• Jef Taylor blogs as “The Urban Pantheist” at http://urbpan.livejournal.com
• Archipelago: Portraits of Life in the World's Most Remote Island Sanctuary by David Liittschwager and Susan Middleton (National Geographic, 2005)
• American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, edited by Bill McKibben (Library of America, 2008)
• The Spring of Joy: Nature Essays by Mary Webb (Dodo Press, 2008)
• Deserts: A Literary Companion, edited by Wayne Grady (Greystone, 2008)
• Open Wide a Wilderness, an anthology of Canadian nature poetry edited by Nancy Holmes, published by (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008)R
• Readers can now find many out-of-print title at Google Books, including Fir Flower Tablets, a collection of her versions of Chinese poems which Amy Lowell based on translations by Florence Ayscough (Houghton Mifflin, 1921)
• Toad to a Nightingale, light verse by Brad Leithauser, with illustrations by his brother Mark Leithauser (Godine, 2007)
• Birds, Beasts and Flowers by D.H. Lawrence (Godine, 2007)
• The Squanicook Eclogues by Melissa Green (Norton, 1987)