Arctic Dreams, Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, by Barry Lopez (Penguin Random House, Open Road Media, ebook).
I am awed by this work; it’s substantial. Lopez’ immersion in the far north, his super-knowledgeable approach to the animals and land, and its history, and all this precisely written, his own experience and thoughts interwoven with stories from his reading in early explorers’ accounts of living in extreme conditions. He comes across a polar bear as you might expect, and it’s wonderful to see that bear through his eyes; he notes industrial encroachments, but it’s the more natural, native world that seems most to compel:
One begins to notice spots of brilliant red, orange, and green, for example, among the monotonic browns of a tundra tussock. A wolf spider lunges at a glistening beetle. A shred of muskox wool lies inert in the lavender bloom of a saxifrage. He mentions a Danish explorer who finds on the ground “the gracile rib bone of an arctic hare.
The Poetic Species, A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass (Bellevue Literary Press).
This is a short book, based on a free-spirited conversation between poet Bob Hass and social biologist E. O. Wilson; the text evolved from their public dialogue at the American Museum of Natural History, December 2012. It’s nice that at the end each offers a short list of valued writings, “literary works of science or nature writing. . . .”
A Place to Live and Other Selected Essays by Natalia Ginzburg, chosen & translated from Italian by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (Seven Stories Press).
I first read Ginzburg’s essays in The Little Virtues. She writes so directly and subtly about her life, the politics, her writing, her psychoanalysis, Rome, & things she has suffered. The translation reads very well.
Secretaries of the Moon, The Letters of Wallace Stevens & José Rodriguez Feo, eds. Beverly Coyle, Alan Filreis (Duke University Press).
The Harvard educated Cuban José Rodriguez Feo was founding editor, with José Lezama Lima, of Orígenes, the most important Cuban literary journal of its time (1944- 1956) and where some of the Cuban poets I’ve translated started out; this Cuban connection with Stevens interests me so much. Rodriquez Feo initiated the correspondence in the 1940s when he was in his early twenties and Stevens sixty five.
The Journal of Jules Renard, edited and translated by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget (Tin House Books).
That it’s translated by poet Louise Bogan drew me to this work, along with aphoristic excerpts online. The journal starts in 1887 with the author very young, and goes through 1910. The passages are selected, the complete journal in French is over a thousand pages.
This from the start:
Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page. It writes three hundred. No novel exists which an ordinary intelligence could not conceive . . .