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The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape

The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape

Current price: $24.95
Publication Date: July 25th, 2017
Publisher:
Shambhala
ISBN:
9781611804607
Pages:
328
Bear Pond Books of Montpelier
1 on hand, as of Mar 28 4:52pm
On Our Shelves Now

Description

An exploration of the emerging Western consciousness of how deeply we belong to the wild Cosmos, as seen through the lineage of modern America's great avant-garde poets --a thrilling journey with today's premier translator of the Chinese classics.

Henry David Thoreau, in The Maine Woods, describes a moment on Mount Ktaadin when all explanations and assumptions fell away for him and he was confronted with the wonderful, inexplicable thusness of things. David Hinton takes that moment as the starting point for his account of a rewilding of consciousness in the West: a dawning awareness of our essential oneness with the world around us. Because there was no Western vocabulary for this perception, it fell to poets to make the first efforts at articulation, and those efforts were largely driven by Taoist and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist ideas imported from ancient China. Hinton chronicles this rewilding through the lineage of avant-garde poetry in twentieth-century America—from Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and Robinson Jeffers to Gary Snyder, W. S. Merwin, and beyond—including generous selections of poems that together form a compelling anthology of ecopoetry. In his much-admired translations, Hinton has re-created ancient Chinese rivers-and-mountains poetry as modern American poetry; here, he reenvisions modern American poetry as an extension of that ancient Chinese tradition: an ecopoetry that weaves consciousness into the Cosmos in radical and fundamental ways.

About the Author

David Hinton’s many translations of classical Chinese poetry have earned wide acclaim for creating compelling contemporary poems that convey the texture and density of the originals. He is also the first translator in over a century to translate the five seminal masterworks of Chinese philosophy: I Ching, Tao Te ChingChuang TzuAnalects, and Mencius. Hinton has received many national awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, both major awards for poetry translation, and most recently, a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Praise for The Wilds of Poetry: Adventures in Mind and Landscape

“It is an impressive collection, both in the breadth of its writers and in Hinton’s contextual analysis… The Wilds of Poetry is a worthy addition to the study and history of poetry, and it deserves a place in any library.”--Rain Taxi Review of Books

“Hinton’s music is subtle, modulated. . . . He continues to enlarge our literary horizon.”--Rosemary Waldrop, citation for Landon Translation Prize, American Academy of Poets