This is the first study in a Western language devoted to one of the most visually distinctive features of the landscape in China--moya or moya shike, texts carved into granite boulders and cliffs that are part of the natural terrain at thousands of sites of historic or scenic interest. These inscriptions, carved in large, bold characters, served as a vast repository of texts produced continuously for over two thousand years and constitue an important form of public art. Focusing on the period prior to the eighth century C.E., Harrist demonstrates that the significance of the inscriptions depends on the interaction of words with topography, so that the medium of the written work has transformed geological formations into landscapes of ideological and religious significance.

Published to great acclaim in 2006, the hardcover edition of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape met with outstanding reviews and strong sales, going into three printings. A language-lover's dream, Home Ground revitalized a descriptive language for the American landscape by combining geography, literature, and folklore in one volume. Now in paperback, this visionary reference is available to an entire new segment of readers. Home Ground brings together 45 poets and writers to create more than 850 original definitions for words that describe our lands and waters. The writers draw from careful research and their own distinctive stylistic, personal, and regional diversity to portray in bright, precise prose the striking complexity of the landscapes we inhabit. Home Ground includes 100 black-and-white line drawings by Molly O’Halloran and an introductory essay by Barry Lopez.

A lexicon and guide for discovering the essence of landscape.

This eloquent and powerful book combines poetry and pragmatism to teach the language of landscape. Anne Whiston Spirn, author of the award-winning The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design, argues that the language of landscape exists with its own syntax, grammar, and metaphors, and that we imperil ourselves by failing to learn to read and speak this language. To understand the meanings of landscape, our habitat, is to see the world differently and to enable ourselves to avoid profound aesthetic and environmental mistakes. Offering examples that range across thousands of years and five continents, Spirn examines urban, rural, and natural landscapes. She discusses the thought of renowned landscape authors--Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmsted, Lawrence Halprin--and of less well known pioneers, including Australian architect Glenn Murcutt and Danish landscape artist C. Th. Sørensen. She discusses instances of great landscape designers using landscape fluently, masterfully, and sometimes cynically. And, in a probing analysis of the many meanings of landscape, Spirn shows how one person's ideal landscape may be another's nightmare, how Utopian landscapes can be dark. There is danger when we lose the connection between a place and our understanding of it, Spirn warns, and she calls for change in the way we shape our environment, based on the notions of nature as a set of ideas and landscape as the expression of action and ideas in place.

Living on an island at the edge of the known world, the medieval Irish were in a unique position to examine the spaces of the North Atlantic region and contemplate how geography can shape a people. This book is the first full-length study of medieval Irish topographical writing. It situates the theories and poetics of Irish place – developed over six centuries in response to a variety of political, cultural, religious and economic changes – in the bigger theoretical picture of studies of space, landscape, environmental writing and postcolonial identity construction. Presenting focused studies of important literary texts by authors from Ireland and Britain, it shows how these discourses influenced European conceptions of place and identity, as well as understandings of how to write the world.

Intends to present a condition of contemporary landscape by measuring it through a direct and immediate form: terms, definitions, ideas, microstories, short texts, notes. This title is a collection of instant snaps rather than a complete critical and theoretical look at the subject.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE From the bestselling author of UNDERLAND, THE OLD WAYS and THE LOST WORDS 'Few books give such a sense of enchantment; it is a book to give to many, and to return to repeatedly' Independent 'Enormously pleasurable, deeply moving. A bid to save our rich hoard of landscape language, and a blow struck for the power of a deep creative relationship to place' Financial Times 'A book that ought to be read by policymakers, educators, armchair environmentalists and active conservationists the world over' Guardian 'Gorgeous, thoughtful and lyrical' Independent on Sunday 'Feels as if [it] somehow grew out of the land itself. A delight' Sunday Times Discover Robert Macfarlane's joyous meditation on words, landscape and the relationship between the two. Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather. Travelling from Cumbria to the Cairngorms, and exploring the landscapes of Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd and others, Robert Macfarlane shows that language, well used, is a keen way of knowing landscape, and a vital means of coming to love it.

Rediscover the lost words of an ancient land in this new and updated edition of an international bestseller. Most people associate Britain and Ireland with the English language, a vast, sprawling linguistic tree with roots in Latin, French, and German, and branches spanning the world, from Australia and India to North America. But the inhabitants of these islands originally spoke another tongue. Look closely enough and English contains traces of the Celtic soil from which it sprung, found in words like bog, loch, cairn and crag. Today, this heritage can be found nowhere more powerfully than in modern-day Gaelic. In Thirty-Two Words for Field Manchán Magan explores the enchantment, sublime beauty and sheer oddness of a 3000-year-old lexicon. Imbuing the natural world with meaning and magic, it evokes a time-honoured way of life, from its 32 separate words for a field, to terms like loisideach (a place with a lot of kneading troughs), bróis (whiskey for a horseman at a wedding), and iarmhaireacht (the loneliness you feel when you are the only person awake at cockcrow). Told through stories collected from Magan's own life and travels, Thirty-Two Words for Field is an enthralling celebration of Irish words, and a testament to the indelible relationship between landscape, culture and language.

See the images and read the stories behind the creative process of one of America’s most respected landscape photographers, William Neill.

For more than two decades, William Neill has been offering his thoughts and insights about photography and the beauty of nature in essays that cover the techniques, business, and spirit of his photographic life. Curated and collected here for the first time, these essays are both pragmatic and profound, offering readers an intimate look behind the scenes at Neill’s creative process behind individual photographs as well as a discussion of the larger and more foundational topics that are key to his philosophy and approach to work.

Drawing from the tradition of behind-the-scenes books like Ansel Adams’ Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs and Galen Rowell’s Mountain Light: In Search of the Dynamic Landscape, Light on the Landscape covers in detail the core photographic fundamentals such as light, composition, camera angle, and exposure choices, but it also deftly considers those subjects that are less frequently examined: portfolio development, marketing, printmaking, nature stewardship, inspiration, preparation, self-improvement, and more. The result is a profound and wide-ranging exploration of that magical convergence of light, land, and camera.

Filled with beautiful and inspiring photographs, Light on the Landscape is also full of the kind of wisdom that only comes from a deeply thoughtful photographer who has spent a lifetime communicating with a camera. Incorporating the lessons within the book, you too can learn to achieve not only technically excellent and beautiful images, but photographs that truly rise above your best and reveal your deeply personal and creative perspective—your vision, your voice.

This volume focuses on how landscape is represented in language and thought and what this reveals about the relationships of people to place and to land. -- Back cover.