Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Earth Words: Conversing with Three Sages

Earth Words: Conversing with Three Sages

Reibetanz, John

Paperback

Series: Hugh MacLennan Poetry

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0228009014
ISBN13: 9780228009016
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Oct 20 2021
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.40 Width: 4.90 Depth: 7.40
Language: English

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.

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