Earth Words: Conversing with Three Sages Volume 64 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780228009016)

The leaves of paper / butterfly-wing thin / let light stream through / only one side of each.If "poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead," as Seamus Heaney put it, Earth Words breaks bread with three earlier writers through the glosa, a poetic form that unfolds as a dialogue. The collection inscribes a series of concentric circles, moving outwards from the eleventh-century world of Wang An-shih through the nineteenth century of Henry Thoreau and into the twentieth century with Emily Carr.Though the environmental and political problems of the twenty-first century feel unique, the figures in this book are met with similar challenges. Wang's writings embody an ideal relationship between self and nature, preserving a sense of rootedness in times resembling the upheavals of the Trump era. This relationship is confirmed in conversations with Thoreau, whose closeness to nature provides an antidote to our age's dependence on digital forms of communication. He also grapples with slavery and the failure to respect the full humanity of Indigenous peoples, struggles that ripple out into the present. Carr's writings and art enter into Indigenous cultures and witness the enduring value of their way of looking at nature. She realizes that the impulse to creatively express one's being runs through the entire natural world.Culminating in this realization, the concentric circles of Earth Words broaden out to include its twenty-first-century readers as well as its writers in a vision of creative growth.

Author: John Reibetanz
ISBN-10: 0228009014
ISBN-13: 9780228009016
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Language: English
Published: 10/20/2021
Pages: 128
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 7.40h x 4.90w x 0.40d