The first collection of original poetry by the renowned nature writer
and highly lauded translator of the Chinese classics.
Traveling today I
found a river
somewhere inside
me, wondered
how far it
wanders there
and how much
sky it
mirrors. All day
long, wind and desert
light, I
followed that river's
distances . . .
Weaving mind and landscape together in meditations on sky and wind,
ridgeline and horizon, existence and self, Desert marks David Hinton's
first collection of original poetry in over a decade. Hinton's poetic
art has long shined brilliantly through his widely acclaimed Chinese
translations--and here speaks for itself in his contemporary voice as he
turns his attention to the transcendent landscape of the American West.
Updating the philosophical insights of ancient China that Hinton has
explored so deeply, these poems bring the wonder and ancient mystery of
the desert landscape to light. Hinton demonstrated in The Wilds of
Poetry how those ancient Chinese insights shaped the innovative
American poetry of our time, and here he extends that tradition in poems
that are spare and spacious, as vast and open as the desert itself.
