From California to the Klondike, prospector Holly Skinner follows a trail of gold across the nineteenth -century American West. Living in a ghost town on Wyoming's South Pass, she steps back into a world where gold ruled the passions of those who pursued it and changed the shape of the nation that found it. In a style reminiscent of John McPhee, Skinner weaves the story of her own solitudinous search for the precious metal into her accounts of the gold rushes that so dramatically accelerated the westward movement.

??Wallace Stevens? ?Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird? appeared originally in 1917 and was subsequently published in his first book, Harmonium, in 1923. In a letter, Stevens once wrote that ?this group of poems is not meant to be a collection of epigrams or of ideas, but of sensations.? If this is indeed the poet?s intent, the poem provides readers with no fewer than thirteen perspectives or observances about blackbirds, but in those ?thirteen ways? is the immeasurable culmination of sensations. Just as the poet?s imagination invites readers to discover the infinite mysteries of the world and how these unify us in unexpected ways, Corinne Jones? new visual interpretation of Stevens? poem invites us, again, to re-explore the multiplicity of observation and subsequent knowledge.????This new trade edition, a 10x10 reprint of the original fine arts book, juxtaposes Jones?s beautiful and sensual prints of blackbirds against Stevens?s poetic text. The result is that the life and power inherent in each artwork is increased wonderfully and vibrantly when taken as a whole.??.

Winner of the 1996 Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry selected by Chase Twichell. "Like the voice in Whitman, which she exuberantly appropriates and updates, McFadden's speaker is at once uniquely human and recognizable in all of us. . .a genuinely ambitious book, a book with big wings." --Chase Twichell

"In this elegant narrative, celebrated naturalist Ted Floyd guides you through a year of becoming a better birder. Choosing 200 top avian species to teach key lessons, Floyd introduces a new, holistic approach to bird watching and shows how to use the tools of the 21st century to appreciate the natural world we inhabit together whether city, country or suburbs." -- From book jacket.

Examining contemporary poetry by way of ethnicity and gender, Kenneth Lincoln tracks the Renaissance invention of the Wild Man and the recurrent Adamic myth of the lost Garden. He discusses the first anthology of American Indian verse, The Path on the Rainbow (1918), which opened Jorge Luis Borges' university surveys of American literature, to thirty-five contemporary Indian poets who speak to, with, and against American mainstream bards. From Whitman's free verse, through the Greenwich Village Renaissance (sandwiched between the world wars) and the post-apocalyptic Beat incantations, to transglobal questions of tribe and verse at the century's close, Lincoln shows where we mine the mother lode of New World voices, what distinguishes American verse, which tales our poets sing and what inflections we hear in the rhythms, pitches, and parsings of native lines. Lincoln presents the Lakota concept of "singing with the heart of a bear" as poetry which moves through an artist. He argues for a fusion of estranged cultures, tribal and émigré, margin and mainstream, in detailing the ethnopoetics of Native American translation and the growing modernist concern for a "native" sense of the "makings" of American verse. This fascinating work represents a major new effort in understanding American and Native American literature, spirituality, and culture.

Veteran environmental tutor and retired countryside ranger Keith Taylor seeks out spiritual and visual riches as he undertakes a year travelling to locations that have always intrigued him or may offer a fresh relationship with the outdoors, both through his own seasonally aware eyes and those of equally restless colleagues. Here, in The Seasonal Eye, he takes the reader through extreme parts of Britain, from the foot of an oak in Savernake Forest, Wiltshire, to the caves of a Nottingham border ice age sanctuary, our coastlines and nature reserves now managed by our county naturalists trusts and the varied terrains of the Cairngorms. This inquisitive man invites us to join him in his quests to discover how the compulsion to merge supposition with reality provides a clearer understanding of the precarious yet adaptive environmental issues that surround us all.

This fruitful pairing of literary and biographical interpretation follows Wallace Stevens’s poetry through the lens of its dominant metaphor—the seasons of nature—and illuminates the poet’s personal life experiences reflected there. From Stevens’s first collection, Harmonium (1923), to his last poems written shortly before his death in 1955, George S. Lensing offers clear and detailed examination of Stevens’s seasonal poetry, including extensive discussions of “Autumn Refrain,” “The Snow Man,” “The World as Meditation,” and “Credences of Summer.” Drawing upon a vast knowledge of the poet, Lensing argues that Stevens’s pastoral poetry of the seasons assuaged a profound and persistent personal loneliness. An important scholarly assessment of a major twentieth-century modernist, Wallace Stevens and the Seasons also serves as an appealing introduction to Stevens.