new Doug Peacock - The Essential Grizzly

We have just received The Essential Grizzly, by Doug and Andrea Peacock. Also this week we received Grizzlies and Grizzled Old Men - A Tribute to those who fought to save The Great Bear - by Mike Lapinski (and why is the title in the past tense?) This book has a chapter on Doug Peacock, as well as chapters on the Craighead brothers, Chuck Jonkel and a number of others. We do also have Doug Peacock's earlier books The Grizzly Years and Walking It Off.

maggie brown - hunting and eating list

Maggie Brown sent this booklist on "hunting and eating, meat and life, death and food":

Gary Snyder Practice of the Wild "Everyone who ever lived took the lives of other animals, pulled plants, plucked fruit, and ate. Primary people have had their own ways of trying to understand the precept of nonharming. They knew that taking life required gratitude and care. There is no death that is not somebody's food, no life that is not somebody's death...We too will be offerings - we are all edible."

Jose Ortega y Gassett Meditations on Hunting
"Every good hunter is uneasy in the depths of his conscience when faced with the death he is about to inflict on the enchanting animal. He does not have the final and firm conviction that his conduct is correct. But neither, it should be understood, is he certain of the opposite."

Paul Shepard Traces of an Omnivore
"...there is no escape from the reality that life feeds by death-dealing (and its lesson in death-receiving). The way "out" of the dilemma is into it,...You cannot sit out the game, but must personally play or hide from it."

David Peterson Heartsblood. Hunting, Spirituality and Wilderness in America
"While hunting's critics often deride the activity as a barbaric anachronism - a filthy red remnant from our distant savage past - human ecology counters that since we evolved via hunting, and remain physically, mentally, and emotionally (genetically) exactly as we were then, to hunt is to be human."

Sandor Katz Wild Fermentation
"Wild fermentation is a way of incorporating the wild into your body, becoming one with the natural world. Wild foods, microbial cultures included, possess a great, unmediated life force, which can help us adapt to shifting conditions and lower our susceptibility to disease. The microorganisms are everywhere, and the techniques for fermenting them are simple and flexible."

booklist from Jeffrey Cramer, of the Thoreau Institute

Jeffrey Cramer, curator of collections at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, sends this booklist:
As a Thoreauvian and editor of Thoreau's works I must put Walden at the top of my list. There is no book like it and its relevence to the world we live in today is uncanny. and the solutions it offers to our way of life are as correct as they were 150 years ago, if we only had the ability to listen.
No one is writing better prose today than Wendell Berry, so I must put his A Place On Earth on the list, although I have an urge to cheat and list all of the titles in his Port William cycle.
Melville's Moby Dick is still the ultimate novel for me, adventurous both in story and in style, and a book to which I must return every few years.
Whitman's Leaves of Grass because it is Whitman and is Leaves of Grass.
And finally Edward Abbey's Down the River because we need to be able to laugh about ourselves.

nanao sakaki and tetsuo nagasawa

John Suiter, author of Poets On The Peaks - Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen & Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades, is in Japan, researching his next book, a biography of Gary Snyder. He has heard poetry readings by Nanao Sakaki and Tetsuo Nagasawa, both of whom have spent long periods of time on Suwanose Island, an island community visited by gary Snyder in the 1960s. Tetsuo still lives there, working as a commercial fisherman.
Tetsuo has a new book out, Stumbling Earth, from Flying Books. The poems are in Japanese, with some English translations, and an introduction by Gary Snyder, and we have just sent for copies. (let us know if you want to reserve a copy)
Here is a sample:
The tree eats the mist.
It eats the moon and the faint wind
It eats of course the lunatic storm and the peaceful cloud
It eats a spoonful of soil that a snail sits down on
And the soft death of the ocean on the table
And the tree, leaning on the sky,
Falls asleep for the moment.

John asked Nanao when he would have a new book, and Nanao said " First I have to write a poem. Not so easy! Toooo lazy!"

book list from martin murie

Martin Murie sent this list of "some good books":

Michael Robinson Predatory Bureaucracy, The Extermination of Wolves and the transformation of the West
where animals, bureaucrats , naturalists, ranchers, varmentalists together make history. stories linked to stories. seriously researched. Four stars.

Eric Foner and Joshua Brown Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction

Michael Pyle Walking the High Ridge - Life as a Field Trip
includes a very short excerpt of his "novel in perpetual progress" Maddalena Mountain, where the lead is played by a butterfly. Pyle is an entomologist focusing on Lepidoptera, and many other critters.

Jack Turner The Abstract Wild Opens with this epigraph from Robinson Jeffers " A little too abstract, a little too wise/ it is time for us to kiss the Earth again"

Jozef Keulartz The Struggle for Nature
Keulartz writes about the recovery of "nature" in Holland. Amusing tales of cock-eyed programs.

poem by Aharon Shabtai

Easter today, and a poem by Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai, from his collection J'Accuse:

Rosh Hashanah

Even after the murder
of the child Muhammad on Rosh HaShana
the paper didn't go black.
In the same water in which the snipers
wash their uniforms
I prepare my pasta,
and over it pour
olive oil in which I've browned
pine nuts,
which I cooked for two minutes with dried tomatoes,
crushed garlic, and a tablespoon of basil.
As I eat, the learned minister of foreign afairs
and public security
appears on the screen,
and when he's done
I write this poem.
For that's how it's always been -
the murderers murder,
the intellectuals make it palatable,
and the poet sings.


translation by Peter Cole, from the Hebrew

Simon Pettet's poetry list

Poet Simon Pettet read at our store last month, and now shares this list with us, a quick list limited to 5 books:

The Burial of Count Orgaz & Other Poems by Pablo Picasso, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, with an afterword by Michel Leiris

The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan edited by Alice Notley with Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan

War Variations Amelia Rosselli (translated from the Italian by Lucia Re and Paul Vangelesti)

Exchanges of Earth and Sky Jack Collom (foreword by Sam Keen and introduction by Marcella Durand)

The Tiger in the Mirror Rita Degli Esposti (translated from the Italian by Tom Raworth)

poetry and human rights

tomorrow i am on a panel on poetry and human rights, at the university of maine in augusta. the panel coordinator today asked me for a list of a half dozen poets whose work has influenced me in this area of thinking, so here is a list, the first six who came to mind:
Nazim Hikmet
Fadhil al-Azzawi
Carolyn Forche
Czeslaw Milosz
Paul Celan
Nicolas Guillen

Who would you add?